(^) ^L^ ^t^-^ Sfrattk A. Harke SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND WORKS BY CHARLES G. HARPER The Portsmouth Road, and its Tributaries : To-day and in Days of Old. The Dover Road : Annals of an Ancient Turnpike. The Bath Road : History, Fashion, and Frivolity on an Old ] Highway. The Exeter Road: The Story of the West of Englantl Highway. The Great North Road: The Old Mail Koad to Scotland. Two \'ols. The Norwich Road : An East Anglian Highway. The Holyhead Road : The Mail-Coach Road to Dublin. Twt) Vols. The Cambridge, Ely, and King's Lynn Road: The Great Fenland Highway. The Newmarket, Bury, Thetford, and Cromer Road : Sport and History on an East Anglian Turnpike. The Oxford, Gloucester, and Milford Haven R:ad : The Ready Way to South Wales. Two Vols. The Brighton Road : Speed, Sport, and History on the Classic Highway. The Hastings Road and the " Happy Springs of Tunbridge." Cycle Rides Round London. A Practical HandbSok of Drawing for Modern Methods of Reproduction. Stage-Coach and Mail in Days of Yore. Two Vols. The Ingoldsby Country: Literary Landmarks of "The Ingoldsby Legends.'' The Hardy Country : Literary Landmarks of the Wessex Novels. The Dorset Coast. The South Devon Coast. The Old Inns of England. Two \'oIs. Love in the Harbour : a Longshore Comedy. Rural Nooks Round London (Middlesex and Surrey). Haunted Houses: Tales of the Supernatural. The Manchester and Glasgow Road. This Way to Gretna Green. Two \'ols. The North Devon Coast. Half-Hours with the Highwaymen. Two Vols. The Autocar Road Book. The Somerset Coast. The Cornish Coast. North. The Cornish Coast. South. Thames Valley Villages. Two Vols. The Kentish Coast 1 , ,7 ^ In /he Pi ess. The Sussex Coast ) SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND SOME DELIGHTS OF THE ANCIENT TOWN OF STRATFORD-UPON-AVON AND THE COUNTRY ROUND ABOUT; TOGETHER WITH A SKETCH OF THE LIFE OF MR. WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE IN WHICH MANY THINGS BOTH NEW AND ENTER- TAINING ARE TO BE FOUND, PRETTILY SET FORTH FOR THE PLEASURE OF THE GENTLE READER ; AND WHEREIN CERTAIN FANATICS ARE HANDSOMELY CONFUTED WRITTEN BY CHARLES G. HARPER, and FOR THE MOST PART ALSO ILLUSTRATED BY HIM WITH A PEN OTHER ILLUSTRATIONS ARE FROM PHOTOGRAPHS New York JAMES POTT & COMPANY London: CHAPMAN & HALL, Ltd. 1913 RirnAKD Ci.AY & Sons, Limited, BRUNSWICK STREET, STAMKORD STREET, S.E., AND BUNGAY, SUFFOLK. ■^'^'^ '-ymTTr^ "LIBRARy PREFACE By " Shakespeare Land," as used in these pages, Stratford-on-Avon and the country within a radius of from twelve to twenty miles are meant; comprising parts of Warwickshire and Gloucestershire, and some portions of Worcestershire which are mentioned by Shakespeare, or must have been familiar to him. So many thousands annually visit Stratford-on-Avon that the town, and in some lesser degree the surrounding country, are thought to be hackneyed and spoilt for the more intellectual and leisured visitor; but that is very far from being the case. Apart from such acknowledged centres of Shakespearean interest as the Birthplace at Stratford-on-Avon, the parish church, and Anne Hatha- way's Cottage at Shottery; and excepting such great show-places as Kenilworth and Warwick castles, Shake- speare Land is by no means overrun, and is in every way charming and satisfying. Stratford town itself, the very centre of interest, is unspoiled ; and the enterprise of the majority of Shakespearean pilgrims is of such a poor quality, and their intellectual requirements as a rule so soon satisfied, that the real beauties of the Warwickshire villages and the towns and villages of the Cotswolds are to them a sealed book. Except these byways be explored, such an essential side of Shake- speare as that I have touched upon in the chapter " Shakespeare the Countryman " will be little under- stood. PREFACE It is thus entirely a mistaken idea to think the Shake- speare Country overdone. On the contrary, it is much less known than it ought to be, and Avould be, were it in any other land than our own. And Stratford itself has not done so much as might have been expected in exploiting possible Shakespearean interest. Ancient house-fronts that the poet must have known still await the removal of the plaster which for two centuries or more has covered them; and the Corporation archives have not yet been thoroughly explored. Incidentally these pages may serve to expose some of the Baconian heresies. If there be many whose judg- ment is overborne by the tub-thumping of the Baconians, let them turn to some of the extravagances of Donnelly and others mentioned here, and then note the many local allusions which Shakespeare and none other could have written. The Bacon controversy, which since 1857 has offered considerable employment for speculative minds, and is still in progress, is now responsible for some six hundred books and pamphlets, monuments of perverted ingenu- ity and industrious research misapplied ; of evidence misunderstood, and of judgment biassed by a clearly proclaimed intention to place Bacon where Shakespeare stands. These exceedingly well-read gentlemen, profited in strange concealments, have produced a deal of skimble- skamble stuff that galls our good humours. The veriest antics, they at first amuse us, but in a longer acquaint- ance they are, as Hotspur says of Glendower, " as tedious as a tired horse, a railing wife ; Worse than a smoky house." This is no place to fully enter the discussion, but we may here note the opinion of Harvey, the great con- temporary man of science, on Bacon, the amateur of science. " My Lord Chancellor," he said, " writes about vi PREFACE Science like a Lord Chancellor." Any one who reads Bacon's poetry will notice that the poets might have applied the same taunt to his lines. Vet they tell us now, these strange folk, eager for a little cheap notoriety, not only that " Bacon wrote the Greene, Marlowe, and Shakespeare plays," but that his is the pen that gives the Authorised Version of the Bible its literary grace. Well, well. They say the owl was a baker's daughter; a document in madness. Charles G. Harper. Ealing, August 24, 1912. vn CONTENTS I'AGE ^Chaptkr I ......... 1 ~~ The Begiuiiing's of Stratford-oii-Avon. Chapter II ........ 6 The Sliake.>^])eares — .Fohu Shakespeare, Ghn-er, Wool- merchant — Birtli of A\^illiam Shakespeare — Rise and Decline of John Sliakespeare — Early Marriage of William. Chapter III 12 Anne Hathaway, Sliakespeare's briile — The hasty marriage — Sliakespeare's ^vild young days — He leaves for London — (irendon rnderwood. Chapter IV 22 Continued decline in the affairs of John Sliakespeare — A\'illiam Sliakespeare's success in London — Death of Hamnet, ^Villiam Shakespeare's only son — Shakespeare buys New Place — He retires to Stratford — Writes his last play. The Tempest — His 42 44 4(; 4H 54 .5(5 o8 01 (U) 70 80 80 8!) 92 100 103 lOG 109 112 120 120 12;5 125 140 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS " Dancing AJarston " . Dining-room, formerly the Kitclien, King's Lodge " Drunken Bidford " . The " Falcon," Hidford " Haunted Hillhorough " (1) " Haunted Hillhorough " {-l) " Hungry f^irafton " .... The Hollow Road, E.xhall . " Papist Wixford " .... Bras.s to Thomas de C'ruvve and wife, A^^ixfo " Beggarly Broom " .... C'lopton Bridge, and the '" Swan'.s Xest " Clirtord C'haml)ers .... Old Houses, Chipping C'ampden . The Market House, Chipping Campden CJrevel's House ..... Interior of the Market House, Chipping Cample'.i Chipping Campden Church . Brass to A\'illiam Grevel and wife, Chipping Campden Compton >\^ynyates .... Boat Lane, \Velford .... Bell ToA\er, Evesham .... The Almonry, Evesham Abbey tiateway, Evesham . ■ . High Street, Tewkesbury The "Bear" luu and Bridge, Tewkesliur\ The Arden House, Home of Shakespeare's mother, W Wootton A^^awen Church Shakespeare Hall, Howington Leicester's Hospital, \\^arwick Leicester's Hospital : the Courtyard Leicester's Hospibvl ; one of the Brethren The Beauchamp C'hapel, AFarwick The Crypt of St. Mary's, Warwick Caesar's Tower, Warwick Castle . Kenilworth Castle ; Ruins of the Banquetting Hall To face To Jace Imcote To t'acf To fare l-Af; E U2 145 149 150 151 153 154 15(5 157 150 KU 1(j5 1(>7 174 174 177 178 182 184 192 198 204 206 209 223 227 233 234 23G 239 240 244 246 248 263 278 XIV SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND CHAPTER I The Eefrinnings of Stratford-on-Avon. Ninety-f ive m iles fro m the City of Lo ndon, in the soutli ern~^3art of W arwickshire, and on the left, or northern bank of the Avon, stands a famous town. Not a town famed in ancient history, nor remarkable in warlike story, nor great in affairs of commerce. _J[t_ was never a strong place, with menacing castle or defensive town walls with gates closed at night. It stood upon a branch road, in a thinly-peopled forest- district, and in every age the wars and tumults and gi'eat social and political movements which constitute what is called " history " have passed it by. f Such is, and has been from the beginning, the town of Stratford-on-Avon, whose very name, although now charged with a special significance as the birthplace of Shakespeare, takes little hold upon the imagination when we omit the distinguishing " on Avon." For there are other Stratfords to be found upon the map of England, as necessarily there must be when we consider the origin of the name, which means merely the ford where the " street " — generally a paved Roman road — crossed a river. And as fords of this kind must B 1 V SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND have been very numerous along the ancient roads of this country before bridges were built, we can only be astonished that there are not more Stratfords than the five or six that are found in the gazetteers. The Roman road that came this way Avas a vicinal route from the Watling Street where Birmingham now stands, through Henley-in-Arden and Alcester, the Roman station of Alauna. Passing over the ford of the Avon, it went to London by way of Ettington, Sunrising Hill, and Banbury. Other Roman roads, the Fosse Way and Ryknield Street, remodelled on the lines of ancient British trackAvays, passed east and west of Stratford at an equal distance of six miles. All the surrounding district north of the Avon was woodland, the great Forest of Arden ; and to the south of the river stretched a more low-lying country as far as the foot of the Cotswold Hills, much less thickly wooded. Li the reign of Queen Elizabeth, when the Forest of Arden was greatly diminished, these districts owned two distinctive names : the forest being called "the Wooland," and the southward pasture-lands "the Feldon." The travellers who came this way in early Saxon times, and perhaps even later, came to close grips with the true inwardness of things. They looked death often in the face as they went the lonely road. The wild things in the forest menaced them, floods obscured the fords, lawless men no less fierce than the animals which roamed the tangled brakes lurked and slew. " Now am I in Arden," the wayfarer might have said, anticipat- ing Touchstone, " the more fool I; when I was at home I was in a better place ; but travellers must be content." No town or village then existed upon the banks of Avon, and the first mention of Stratford occurs in A.D. 691, when a monastery situated here is named. 2 STRATFORD-ON-AVOX It was an obscure house, but with extensive and valu- able lands which Bishops of Worcester hungered for and finally obtained. The site of this monastery was scarcely that of the existing town of Stratford, but was where the present parish church stands, in what is known as " Old Stratford," which is on the extreme southerly limit of the town. It was thus situated at some little distance from the ford, Avhich was of course exactly where the Clopton Bridge now crosses the river. At that ford there would probably even then have been a hermit, as there was later, charged with the due guid- ance of travellers, and in receipt of offerings, but of him we know nothing, and next to nothing of the monastery. The Bishops of Worcester, having thus early obtained a grant of the monastery and its lands, became lords of the manor and so remained for centuries, wielding in their spiritual and manorial functions a very complete authority over the town which gradually arose here. To resist in any way the Church's anointed in matters spiritual or temporal would have been to kick most foolishly against the pricks, for in his one autocratic capacity he could blast your worldly prospects, and in the other he could (or it was confidently believed he could) damn you to all eternity. Thus it may well be supposed that those Right Reverend were more feared than loved. r It was an agricultural and cattle-raising community \ that first arose here. " Rother Street " still by its name alludes to the olden passage of the cattle, for " rother " is the good Anglo-Saxon word " hroether," for cattle. The word was known to Shakespeare, who wrote, " The pasture lards the rother 's sides." In 1216 the then Bishop of Worcester obtained a charter for a fair, the first of four obtained between tha date and 1271. The fairs attracted business, and about B 2 3 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND 1290 the first market was founded. The town had begun to grow, slowly, it is true, but substantially. At this period also that Guild arose which was originally a religious and charitable fraternity, but eventually developed into surprising issues, founding a gi'ammar- schooi and becoming a tradesmen's society, whence the incorporation of the town in 1553, and the establishment of a town council derived. Camden, writing about this time, was able to describe it as "a proper little mercat towne." In that era which witnessed the incorporation of the town of Stratford-on-Avon and the birth of Shakespeare the population was some 2000. It is now about 8300 ; a very moderate increase in three hundred and fifty years, and much below the average rate for towns, by which Stratford might now have had a population of \ about 16,000. ^ The incorporation of this little town in the reign of Edward the Sixth was a great event locally. It included the restitution to the people of the place of the buildings and the property of the Guild of Holy Cross which had been confiscated in 1547, when also the inhabitants had been relieved from the yoke of the Bishops of Worcester, whose manor had been taken away from them. It is true that the manorial rights had not been abolished and that the property and its various ancient privileges had only been transferred to other owners, but it was something to the good that the Church no longer possessed these things. These were not arbitrary changes, the whim of this monarch or that, Henry the Eighth and Edward the Sixth did only what others in their place would and must have done. They were certainly sovereigns with convictions of their own, but their attitude of mind was but the Zeitgeist, the spirit of the age, and they did not so much originate it as 4> STRATFORD-ON-AVON be swayed by it. Those statesmen who have been held meanly subservient to them were, after all, men of like convictions. They saw the old order to be outworn and existing institutions ripe for change. It was the age of the Renascence. Everywhere was the new spirit, which was remodelling thought as well as material things. It was the age, above all things, of the new learning. These feelings led the advisers of the young king, Edward the Sixth, to counsel the restitution to the town of the property of the Guild dissolved only six years earlier, with the important provision that the grammar-school was to be re-established and maintained out of its revenues. To this provision we distinctly owe the dramatist, William Shakespeare, who was born at the very time when the educational advantages thus secured to the children of the townsfolk had settled down into smoothly working order. Education cannot produce a Shakespeare, it cannot create genius, but it can give genius that chance in early elementary training without which even the most adaptive minds lose their direction. The ancient buildings of the Guild, which after its long career as a kind of lay brotherhood for what modern people would style " social service," had attained an unlooked-for development as the town authority, thus provided Stratford with its Grammar School and its first town-hall. In those timbered rooms the scholars received their education, and for eighty years, until 1633, when the first hall built especially for the corporation was opened, the aldermen and councillors met there. Among them was John Shakespeare. CHAPTER II Tlie Shakespeares — .Jolin Sliakespeare, Glover, A¥ool-mercliaiit — Birth of William Sliakespeare — Rise and Decline of John Sliakespeare — Early Marriage of William. A MODERN man who now chanced to own the name of " Shakespeare " would feel proud, even of that fortuitous and remote association with the greatest figure in English literature. He might even try to live up to it, although the probabilities are that he would quite early forgo the attempt and become a backslider to commonplace. But available records tell us no good of the earliest bearers of the name. The first Shakespeare of whom we have any notice was a John of that name. He was hanged in 1248, for robbery. It is a very long time ago since this malefactor suffered, and perhaps he Avas one of those very many unfortunate persons who have been in all ages wrongfully convicted. But the name was not in olden times a respectable one. It signified originally one who wielded a spear ; not a chivalric and romantic knight warring with the infidel in Palestine, or jousting to uphold the claims to beauty of his chosen lady, but a common soldier, a rough man-at-arms ; one who was in great request in his country's wars, but was accounted an undesirable when the piping times of peace were come again and every man desired nothing better than to sit beneath his own vine and fig-tree. We have record of a certain Shakespeare who grew so weary of the name that he changed it for " Saunders." But Time was presently to bring revenge, when William 6 THE SHAKESPEARES Shakespeare, afterwards to become a poet and dramatist of unapproachable excellence, was born, to make the choice of that recreant bearer of the name look ridiculous. One Shakespeare before the dramatist's time had reached not only respectability but some kind of local eminence. This was Isabel Shakespeare, who became Prioress of the Priory of Baddesley Clinton, near Knowle. Baddesley Clinton is in the ancient and far-spreading Forest of Arden, and near it is the village of Rowington, where there still remains the very picturesque fifteenth- century mansion called Shakespeare Hall, which is said to have been in the dramatist's time the residence of a Thomas Shakespeare, an uncle. But William Shake- speare's genealogy has not been convincingly taken back beyond his grandfather Richard (whose very Christian name is only traditional), who is stated to have been a farmer at Snitterfield, three miles from Stratford-on- Avon. Warwickshire was, in fact, extremely rich in Shake- speares, many of them no relatives of the dramatist's family. They grew in every hedgerow, and very many of them owned the Christian name of William, but they spelled their patronymic in an amazing number of ways. It is said to be capable of four thousand variations. We will forbear the most of these. " Shaxpeare " is the commonest form. The marriage -bond for William Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway spells his name " Shagspere," and the dramatist himself spells it in two different ways in the three signatures on his will, which forms to the Baconians conclusive proof of the two following contradictory propositions (1) that he did not know how to spell his own name, and (2) that, the spelling being different, the so-called signatures were written by a law-clerk ! As a matter of fact, the 7 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND spelling of one's name was in those times a matter of taste and fancy, which constantly varied. Sir Walter Raleigh, contemporary with Shakespeare, was a scholar whom no one will declare an illiterate, yet he wrote his own name, with a fine disregard of consistency and of what future generations might say, " Rawley," " Ralegh," " Rawleighe " and " Rauleygh." In any case, the " law-clerk " theory will hardly do. A law-clerk who wrote such a shocking bad hand as the six signatures of Shakespeare display could not have earned his living with lawyers and conveyancers. They are signatures, nearly all of them, Avhich might confi- dently be taken to a chemist, to be " made up," but exactly how he would read the " prescription " miust be left to the imagination. Sure and certain foothold upon genealogical fact is only reached with William Shakespeare's father, who established himself at Stratford-on-Avon about 1551, when he seems to have been twenty-one years of age. He was described at various times as a fell-monger and glover, a woolstapler, a butcher and a dealer in hay and corn. Probably, as a son of the farmer at Snitterfield, he was interested in most of these trades. His home and place of business in the town was in Henley Street, then, as now, one of the meaner streets of the place. Its name derives from this forming the way out of Stratford to the town of Henley-in-Arden. The very first thing we have recorded of John Shake- speare at Stratford is his being fined twelve pence for having a muck-heap in front of his door. Twelve pence in that day was equal to about eight shillings and six- pence of our own times ; and thus, when we consider the then notoriously dirty and insanitary condition of Stratford, endured with fortitude, if not with cheerful- ness by the burgesses, we are forced to the conclusion THE SHAKESPEARES that Mr. John Shakespeare's muck-heap must have been a super muck-heap, an extremely large and offensive specimen, that made the gorge of even the least squeamish of his fellow-townsmen rise. Two other tradesmen were fined at the same time, and in 1558 he Avas, in company with four others (among whom was the chief alderman, Francis Burbage) fined in the smaller sum of fourpence for not keeping his gutter clean. By 1556, however, he would seem to have been prospering, for in that year he purchased two copyhold tenements, one in Henley Street, next the house and shop now known as " the birthplace " which he was already occupying; the other in Greenhill Street. Next year he married Mary Arden, of Wilmcote, three miles from Stratford, daughter of Robert Arden, yeoman farmer of that place, said on insufficient evidence to have been kin to the ancient knightly family of Arden. She had become, on her father's death in December 1556, owner of landed property called Asbies, at Wilmcote, and some like interests at Snitterfield, in common with her brothers and sisters. She was thus, in a small way, an heiress. Wilmcote being then merely a hamlet in the parish of Aston Cantlow, they were married at the church of that place. John Shakespeare was now a rising tradesman, and in this same auspicious year became a member of the town council, a body then newly established, upon the granting of a charter of incorporation in 1553. On September 15th, 1558 his daughter Joan was bap- tized. She died an infant. In 1565, after serving various municipal offices, he became an alderman. Meanwhile, at the close of November 1562, a daughter, Margaret, was born, who died the next year; and in 1564, on April 26th, his son William was baptized. The date of the poet's birth is traditionally St. George's Day, 9 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND April 23rd ; now, with the alteration in the calendar, identical with May 5th. In that year the town was scourged by a terrible visitation of the plague, and John Shakespeare is recorded, among others, as a contributor to funds for the poor who suffered by it. On August 30th he paid twelve pence ; on September 6th, sixpence ; on the 27th of the same month another sixpence ; and on October 20th eightpence; about twenty-two shillings of our money. It is only by tradition — ^but that a very old one — that William Shakespeare was born at " the birthplace " in Henley Street ; but there is no reasonable excuse for doubting it, unless we like to think that he was born at the picturesque old house in the village of Clifford Chambers, which afterwards became the vicarage and is now a farmhouse. A John Shakespeare Avas at that time living there, two miles only from Stratford, and it has been suggested that he is identical with the father of William, and that in this plague year he took the precaution of removing his wife out of danger. In 1566 we find a link between the Shakespeares and the Hathaways in John Shakespeare standing surety for Richard Hathaway ; and in the same year his son Gilbert was born ; another Joan being born in 1569. In 1568 and 1571 he attained the highest municipal offices, being elected high-bailiff and senior alderman, and thus, as chief magistrate, is found described in local documents as " Mr. " Shakespeare. In 1571 also his daughter Anne, who died in 1579, was born ; and in 1573 a son, Richard. In 1575 he purchased the freehold of " the birthplace " from one Edmund Hall, for £40. Early in 1578 the first note of ill-fortune is sounded in the career of John Shakespeare. Some financial disaster had befallen him. In January, when the town council had decided to provide weapons for two billmen, a body 10 THE SHAKESPEARES of pikemen, and one archer, and assessed the aldermen for six shillings and eightpence each and the burgesses at half that amount, two of the aldermen were excused the full pay. One, Mr. Plumley, was charged five shillings, and Mr. Shakespeare was to pay only three and fourpence. The following year he defaulted in an assess- ment for the same amount. Meanwhile, he had been obliged to mortgage Asbies, which had come to him with his wife, and to sell the interests at Snitterfield. The Shakespeares, although they in after years again grew prosperous, never recovered Asbies. No one knows what caused these straitened circum- stances. Possibly it was some disastrous speculation in corn. In the midst of this trouble, his seven-year-old daughter, Anne, died, and another son, Edmund, was born, 1580. He ceased to attend meetings of the town council, and his son William entered into an improvident marriage. 11 CHAPTER III Anne Hathaway, Shakespeare's bride — The hasty marriage — Shake- speare's wild young days — He leaves for London — Grendon Underwood. William Shakespeare was but eighteen and a half years of age when he married. Legally, he was an " infant." His wife was by almost eight years his senior, but if we agree with Bacon's saying, that a- man finds himself ten years older the day after his marriage, the disparity became at once more than rectified. She was one Anne, or Agnes, Hathaway; her father, Richard, being a farmer of Shottery. The Hathaways were numerous in this district, there being at that time no fewer than three families of the name in Shottery and others in Stratford. Anne had no fewer than eight brothers and sisters, all of whom, except two, are mentioned in their father's will. Richard, who describes himself in his will as " husbandman," executed that document on September 1st, 1581, and died probably in the June following, for his will was proved in London on July 9th, 1582. Storms of rival theories have raged around the mystery surrounding this marriage, of which the register does not exist. It is claimed that Shakespeare was married at Temple Grafton, Luddington, Billesley, and elsewhere, but no shadow of evidence can be adduced for any of these places. All we know is that on November 28th, 1582, Fulke Sandells and John Richardson, farmers, 12 ANNE HATHAWAY of Stratford, who had been respectively one of the " supervisors " and one of the witnesses of Richard Hathaway 's will, went to Worcester and there entered into a " Bond in £40 against Impediments, to defend and save harmless the right reverend father in God, John, Lord Bushop of Worcester " from any complaint or process that might by any possibility arise out of his licensing the marriage with only once asking the banns. These two bondsmen declared that " William Shagspere, one thone partie and Anne Hathaway of Stratford " (Shottery was and is a hamlet in the parish of Stratford- on-Avon) " in the dioces of Worcester, maiden, may lawfully solemnize marriage together." This document, discovered in the Worcester Registry in 1836, is sufficiently clear and explicit ; but a complication is introduced by a license issued the day before by the Bishop for a marriage " inter Wm. Shaxpere et Anna Whateley de Temple Grafton." It has been suggested that, as there were Whateleys living in the neighbour- hood, and that as there were numerous Shakespeares also, with many Williams among them, this was quite another couple, while others contend that "Whateley" was a mistake of one of the clerks employed in the Bishop's registry, and that the name of Temple Grafton as " place of residence " of the bride was a further mistake, that being the place intended for the ceremony. In any case, the point is of minor interest for the registers of Temple Grafton do not go back to that date, and the fabric of the church itself is quite new. We do not know, therefore, where Shakespeare was married, nor when ; and can but assume that the wedding took place shortly after the bond was signed. Six months later, Shakespeare's eldest daughter was born, for we see in the register of baptisms in Holy Trinity churgh, Stratford, the entry : — 13 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND " 1583, May 26th, Susanna, daughter to WilHam Shakespere." The reason for the hurried visit of the two farmers to Worcester, to hasten on the marriage with but one " asking *' in church now becomes evident. They were friends of the late Richard Hathaway, and were determined that young Shakespeare should not get out of marrying the girl he had — ^wronged, shall we say ? Well, no. There have been many moralists excessively shocked at this pre-nuptial intimacy, and they assert that Shakespeare seduced Anne Hathaway. But young men of just over eighteen years of age do not, I think, beguile young women nearly eight years older. Anne probably seduced him; for woman is more frequently the huntress and the chooser, and man is a very helpless creature before her wiles. The extravagances of the Baconians may well be illustrated here, for although the subject of Shakespeare's marriage has no bearing upon the famous cryptogram and the authorship of the plays, Donnelly spreads himself generously all over Shakespeare's life, and light- heartedly settles for us the mystery of the bond re the marriage of Anne Hathaway and the license to marry Anne Whateley by suggesting that 60^^ names are correct and refer to the same persons. He says Anne Hatha- way married a Whateley and that it was as a widow she married William Shakespeare, her maiden name being given in the bond by mistake ! The sheer absurdity of this is obvious when we consider that if Mr. Donnelly is right, then the bondsmen made the yet grosser error of describing the widow as a " maiden." She was actually at that time neither wife, maid nor widow. Again, Richard Hathaway the father made his will in September 1581, leaving {inter alia) a bequest to Anne " to be paide unto her at the dale of her marriage." She 14 ANNE HATHAWAY was a single young woman then, and yet according to the DonnelHan view she was ah'eady, fifteen months later, a widow, again about to be married. Apologists for this hasty marriage, jealous for the reputation of Shakespeare, are keen to find an excuse in the supposition that he was a Roman Catholic and that he was already married secretly, probably in the room in the roof of Shottery Manor House, which is supposed to have been used at this period as a place of secret worship. But there is no basis for forming any theory as to Shakespeare's religious convictions. A yet more favourite assumption is that Shakespeare and Anne Hathaway went through the ceremony of "hand- fasting," a formal betrothal which, although not a complete marriage and not carrying with it the privileges of marriage was a bar to either of the parties marrying another. Jack was thus made sure of his Jill ; and, perhaps even more important, Jill was certain of her Jack. But if this ceremony had taken place, there would have been no necessity for that hasty journey of those two friends of the Hathaways to Worcester. Nothing is known of the attitude of Shakespeare's parents towards the marriage, nor has any one ever suggested how he supported himself, his wife and family in the years before he left Stratford for London. At the close of January 1585, his twin son and daughter, Hamnet and Judith were born, and they were baptized at Stratford church on February 2nd. Whether he assisted his father in his business of glover, or helped on his farm, or whether he became assistant master at the Grammar School, as sometimes suggested, is mere matter for speculation. John Aubrey, picking up gossip at Stratford, writes — " Mr. William Shakespear was borne at Stratford upon Avon in the county of Warwick. His father was a 15 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND butcher, and I have been told heretofore by some of the neighbours, that when he was a boy he exercised his father's trade, but when he kill'd a calfe he would doe it in a high style, and make a speech." That may or may not be true, but it looks as though William had, about this impressionable age, become stage-struck. He had had numerous opportunities of seeing the players, for his father had in his more pros- perous days been a patron of the strolling companies, both as a private individual and as a member of the town council. In 1569 two such troupes, who called themselves the " Queen's servants," and " servants of the Earl of Warwick," gave performances before the corporation and were paid out of the public monies; a forecast of the municipal theatre ! And no doubt John Shakespeare, together with many other Stratford people, went over to Kenilworth during the magnificent pageants given there by Dudley, Earl of Leicester, in 1575, in honour of Queen Elizabeth; taking with him his little boy, then eleven years of age. Thus would the foundations of an ambition be laid. At this time, 1585, John Shakespeare's affairs, from whatever cause, were under a cloud. They had been declining since 1578, when he had been obliged to mortgage some of the property that had been his wife's, and now he was deprived of his alderman's gown. William about this time, whether in 1585 or 1587 is uncertain, left Stratford for London, whither some of his boyhood's friends had already preceded him, among them Richard Field. Stratford at this time was certainly no place for William, if he wished to emulate Dr. Samuel Smiles' worthies and conform to the gospel of getting on in the world, the most popular gospel ever preached. In 1587, Nicholas Lane, one of his father's creditors, sought to 16 SHAKESPEARE GOES TO LONDON distrain upon John Shakespeare's goods, but the sheriff's officers returned the doleful tale of " no effects," and so he had his trouble for nothing. It is, however, curious that even when reduced to his last straits, John Shake- speare never sold his property, the house in which he lived and carried on business, in Henley Street. In addition to the discredit attaching to being thus one of the Shakespeares who had come down in the world, William, according to the very old, strong and persistent tradition, was at this time showing a very rackety dis- position. He consorted with the wilder young men of the town and went on drinking bouts with them. Sometimes, with them, he raided the neighbouring parks and killed the deer and poached other game ; and the old tradition hints that on these occasions the others made good their escape and Shakespeare was generally caught. Sir Thomas Lucy of Charlecote, who was the chief sufferer from the exploits of these youths, is said to have had Shakespeare whipped, imprisoned and fined for his part in them. To London, therefore, William Shakespeare made his way. With what credentials, if any, did he go ? He had friends in London, among them Richard Field, a schoolfellow, Avho in 1579 had gone thither, to become apprentice to a printer, and in 1587, about this time when Shakespeare left home, had set up in business for himself and become a member of the Stationers' Company. Shakespeare may quite reasonably have sought his help or advice ; and certainly Field six years later published Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis, dedicated to Henry Wriothesley, Earl of Southampton, the foremost literary and dramatic patron of the age, from whose friendship and powerful aid all intellectual aspirants hoped much. It is quite likely that Shakespeare left Stratford c 17 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND with a company of travelling actors, and reaching town with them, gradually drifted into regular employment at one of the only two London theatres that then existed, " The Theatre " and the " Curtain " both in Shoreditch. It is of some interest to speculate upon the manner in which Shakespeare journeyed to London, and the way he went. Was he obliged to walk it, in the tradi- tional manner of the poor countryman seeking his fortune in the great metropolis ? Or did he make the journey by the carrier's cart ? There are two principal roads by which he may have gone ; by Newbold-on- Stour, Long Compton, Chapel House, and Woodstock to Oxford, Beaconsfield and through High Wycombe and Uxbridge, 95 miles ; or he might have chosen to go by Ettington, Pillerton Priors, Sunrising Hill, Wroxton and Banbury, through Aynho, Bicester, Aylesbury, Tring and Watford to London, 92 f miles. Such an one as he would probably first go to London by Avay of Oxford, for, like Thomas Hardy's " Jude the Obscure," he would doubtless think it " a city of light." There are traditions at Oxford of Shakespeare's staying at the " Crown" inn in the Cornmarket in after years. Sometimes he would doubtless go by the Banbury and Bicester route : and along it, at the village of Grendon Underwood, to the left of the road between Bicester and Aylesbury, as you journey towards London, there still linger very precise traditions of Shakespeare having stayed at what was formerly the " Old Ship " inn. Grendon Underwood, or " under Bernwode " as it is styled in old records, appears in an old rhyme as — " The dirtiest town that ever stood/' but it was never a town, and, whatever may once have been its condition, it is no longer dirty. It is not at 18 C 2 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND first sight easily to be understood why Shakespeare, or any other traveller of that age journeying the long straight stretch of the old Roman road, the Akeman Street, between Bicester and Aylesbury, should want to go a mile and a quarter out of his Avay for the purpose of visiting this place, but that they did so is sufficiently proved by the comparative importance of the house that was until about a hundred and twelve years ago the " Old Ship " and is now known as " Shakespeare Farm." It is clearly too large ever to have been built for an ordinary village inn, and is said to have formerly been even larger. If, however, we refer to old maps of the district, it will be found that, for some unexplained reason, the ancient forthright Roman road had gone out of use, and that instead of proceeding direct, along the Akeman Street, the wayfarers of old went a circuitous course, through Grendon Underwood. When this de- viation took place does not appear ; but it was obviously one of long standing. The first available map showing the roads of the district is that by Emanuel Bo wen, 1756, in which the Akeman Street is not shown ; the only road given being that which winds through Grendon. The next map to be issued — that by Thomas Jeffreys, 1788 — gives the Akeman Street, running direct, between point and point, and avoiding Grendon, as it does now. That was the great era of turnpike-acts, providing for the repair and restoration of old roads, and the making of new ; and this was one of the many highways then restored. The " Old Ship " inn, at Grendon Under- wood, at which Shakespeare and many generations of travellers had halted, at once declined with the making of the direct road, and soon retired into private life. The Shakespeare tradition comes down to us through John Aubrey, who, writing in 1680, says — " The humour of the constable, in Midsomer-nighf s 20 GRENDON UNDERWOOD Dreame,^ he happened to take at Grendon, in Bucks — ■ I thinke it was Midsomer night that he happened to lye there — which is the roade from London to Stratford, and there was Uving that constable about 1642, when I first came to Oxon." The village constable referred to was well known to one Josias Howe, son of the rector, born at Grendon, March 29th, 1612, died August 28th, 1701, Avho told Aubrey the story at Oxford, in 1642. The lofty gabled red brick and timber end of Shake- speare Farm, illustrated here, is the earlier part of the building, although the whole of it is probably as old as Shakespeare's time. That earlier wing, the part to which tradition points, is not now occupied, and is, in fact, in a very dilapidated condition, occasional floor- boards, and even some of the stairs, being missing. Where the wearied guests of long ago rested, broody hens are set by the careful farmer's wife on their clutches of eggs. There is little interesting in the architectural way in these dark and deserted rooms, but the flat, pierced, wooden banisters of the staircase are genuinely old and quaint. ^ He should liave said Much Ado About Xofhinr/. 21 CHAPTER IV Continued decline in the affairs of John Shakespeare — William Shakespeare's success in London — Death of Hamnet, William Shakespeare's only son — Sliakespeare buys New Place — He retires to Stratford — ^\''rites his last play, The Tempest — His death. That Shakespeare left his wife and family at home at Stratford-on-Avon every one takes for granted. He " deserted his family," says a rabid Baconian, who elsewhere complains of the lack of evidence to support believers in the dramatist ; forgetting that there is no evidence for this " desertion " story; only one of those many blanks in the life of this elusive man, by which it would appear that while he was reaching fame and making money in London as a playwright and an actor, he held no communication with his kith and kin. There remains no local record of William Shakespeare at Stratford-on-Avon between the year 1587, when he joined with his father in mortgaging the property at Asbies, Wilmcote, which had been his mother's marriage portion, until 1596, when the register of the death of Hamnet, his only son, occurs at Stratford church, on August 11th. But this is sheer negative evidence of his not having visited his native town for over ten years, and is on a par with the famous Baconian argu- ment that because no scrap of Shakespeare's hand- writing, except six almost illegible signatures, has survived, therefore he cannot have written the plays still attributed to him. Meanwhile, his father's affairs steadily grew worse, 22 SUCCESS IN LONDON and in 1592 he was returned as a " recusant " by the commissioners who visited the town for the purpose of fining the statutable fine of £20 all those who had not attended church for one month. John Shake- speare's recusancy has been unwarrantably assumed to be due to Roman Catholic obstinacy ; but the fine was remitted because it was shown that he was afraid to go to church " for processe of debt " ; which, together with the infirmities of age, or sickness, was a lawful excuse. Shakespeare's success in London as an actor, a reviser and editor of old and out-of-date plays, as manager, theatre-proprietor and playwright, is due to that sprack-witted capacity for excelling in almost any chosen field of intellectual activity with which a born genius is gifted. The saying that " genius is a capacity for taking pains " is a dull, plodding man's definition. Genius will very often fling away the rewards of its poAvers through just this lack of staying power, and no plodding pains will supply that intuitive knowledge, that instant perception, which is what we call genius. It was the psychological moment for such an one as Shakespeare to come to London. The drama had a future before it : the intellectual receptivity of the Renascence permeated all classes, and the country was prosperous and growing luxurious. Playwrights were numerous, but as yet their productions had not reached a high level, excepting those of Marlowe, to whose inspiration Shakespeare at first owed much. If Shakespeare lived in these times he would be called a shameless plagiarist, for he went to other authors for his plots — as Chaucer had done with his Canterbury Tales, two hundred years earlier, and as all others had done in between. Not a man of them would escape the charge ; but what Shakespeare took of plot- 23 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND construction and of dialogue he transmuted from the dull and soulless lines we could not endure to read to-day, into a clear fount of wit, wisdom and literary beauty. Shakespeare's career of playwright began as a hack writer and cobbler of existing plays. As an actor his technical knowledge of the requirements of the stage rendered his help invaluable to managers, and the conditions of that time gave no remedy to any author whose plays were thus altered. It may be supposed from lack of evidence to the contrary, that most other dramatic authors submitted to this treatment in silence ; perhaps because they had all been employed, at some time or other in the same way. But one man seems to have bitterly resented a mere actor presuming to call himself an author. This was Robert Greene, who died Sept. 3rd, 1592, after a long career of play-writing and pamphleteering. He died a disappointed man, and wrote a farewell tract, published after his death, which includes a warning to his fellow-authors and an undoubted attack upon Shakespeare, under the thin disguise of " Shake-scene." It is to be considered that Shakespeare had by this time been five years in London ; that he had proved himself singularly adaptable, and had finally, on March 3rd, 1592, attained his first popular success, in the production at the newly-opened " Rose Theatre " on Bankside, Southwark (third London playhouse, opened February 19th, 1592), of Henry the Sixth. It was a veritable triumph. The author played in his own piece, and the other dramatists looked on in dismay. Jealousy does not seem to have followed Shakespeare's good fortune, and the numerous references to him as poet and playwright by others are kindly and fully recognise his superiority. Only Greene's posthumous work exists to show how one resented it. The tract 24 SHAKESPEARE THE ACTOR has the singular title of " A Groats-Worth of Wit bought with a Million of Repentance." Incidentally it warns brother-dramatists against " an upstart Crow, beautified with our feathers that with his Tygers heart wrapt in a players hide supposes he is as well able to bumbast out a blanke verse as the best of you ; and being an absolute Johannes factotum is, in his owne conceite, the only Shake-scene in a countrie." The identification of this crow in borrowed plumage, this " Shake-scene," is completed by the line, " O tiger's heart, wrapp'd in a woman's hide," which is a quotation from the Third Part of Henry the Sixth, where the Duke of York addresses Queen Margaret ; while the term "Johannes factotum," i.e. *' Johnny Do-every- thing," is a sneer at Shakespeare's adaptability and many-sided activities. The merits of Shakespeare as an actor are uncertain. Greene seems to imply that he was of the ranting, bellowing type who tore a passion to tatters and split the ears of the groundlings. Rowe, who wrote of him in 1709 says : " The top of his performance (as an actor) was the Ghost in his own Hamlet " ; not an exacting part ; other traditions say Adam in As You Like It, an even less important character, was his favourite ; but the suggestion we love the better to believe is that his best part was the cynical, melancholy, philosophic Jaques. Donnelly, chief of the Bacon heretics, has in his Great Cryptogram, a weird story of how Bacon Avrote the part of Falstaff for Shakespeare, to fit his great greasy stomach. He knew Shakespeare could not act, and so provided a part in which no acting should be required ; turning Shakespeare's natural disabilities to account, so that, if the audience could not laugh with him in his acting, they should laugh at him and dissolve into merriment at the clumsy antics of so fat a man ! 25 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND There are actor-managers in our times — no actor- author-managers like Shakespeare— who deserve the cat-calls and the missiles of their audiences. They do not merely " lag superfluous on the stage," but ought never to be on it ; like the celebrated actor- manager whose impersonation of Hamlet was, accord- ing to Sir W. S. Gilbert's caustic remark, " funny without being vulgar." It is not conceivable that Shakespeare himself, who puts such excellent advice to actors into the mouth of Hamlet, should himself have been incompetent. With Shakespeare's leap into fame, in 1592, went a simultaneous " boom," as it might now be termed, in theatres and the drama. Theatres multiplied in London, theatrical companies grew prosperous, and such men as Shakespeare, AUeyne and the Burbages amassed wealth. In 1596 died William Shakespeare's only son, Hamnet, whose burial register in the books of Holy Trinity church, Stratford, runs — " August 11th, Hamnet, filius William Shakespeare." His father must surely have been present on this occa- sion. This year is generally said to be that in which the dramatist who in his time had played many parts, returned to his native town, a made man. He came back with his triumphs ringing fresh in his ears, for that season witnessed the great success of the production of Romeo and Juliet. In July, also, his father had applied to the Heralds' College for a grant of arms, an application for a patent of gentility which would have come absurdly from a penniless tradesman. The infer- ence therefore, although we have no documentary evidence to that effect, is that William Shakespeare had not only kept in touch with his people, but had helped his father out of his difficulties and was himself 26 RETURN TO STRATFORD the instigator of this application for a grant of arms. The application was eventually successful. The arms thus conferred are : " Or, on a bend sable, a tilting spear of the first, point upwards, steeled proper. Crest, a falcon, his wings displayed, argent, standing upon a wreath of his colours and supporting a spear in pale, or." The motto chosen was " Non sanz droict." What was this right to heraldic honours and the im- plied gentility they carried, the Shakespeares claimed ? It was based upon a quibble that John Shakespeare's " parent, great-grandfather and late antecessor, for his faithful and approved service to the most prudent prince king H. 7 of famous memorie, was advanced and rewarded with lands and tenements geven to him," etc. The description of the miserly Henry the Seventh as " prudent " is, like " mobled queen," distinctly " good " ; but we are not greatly concerned with that, only with the fact that the martial and loyal antecessors claimed for John Shakespeare were really those of his wife. He adopted his wife's family, or rather, her family's pretensions to call cousins with the more famous Ardens. William Shakespeare had returned to Stratford a well-to-do man, with an income which has been estimated at about £1300 of our money, but he had not yet com- pleted his work, and his reappearance in his native town was not permanent. You figure him now, the dramatist and manager, with considerable shares in the Globe and Blackfriars Theatres, rather concerned to relinquish the trade — not a j^rofession, really, you know — of actor, but with his company much in request at Court and in the mansions of the great. He was, one thinks, a little sobered by the passage of time ; and by the death, this year, of his only son ; and quite sensible of the dignity that new patent of arms had conferred 27 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND upon his father and himself. To mark it, he bought in 1597 a residence, the best residence in the town, although wofully out of repair. It was known, with some awe, to his contemporaries as " the great house." Sixty pounds sterling was the purchase money : we will say £480 of present value. It was bought so cheaply probably because of its dilapidated condition, for it seems to have been built by Sir Hugh Clopton in 1485, and at this time was " in great ruyne & decay & unrepayred." Shakespeare thoroughly renovated his newly-acquired property, and styled it '•' New Place." He did not, apparently, at once take up his residence here, for his theatrical company was acting before the Queen at Whitehall in the spring and he would doubt- less have been present, and perhaps accompanied them when they were on tour in Kent and Sussex in the summer. But he was at Stratford a part of the next year, which was a year of scarcity. He had accumulated a large stock of corn, over against the shortage, and in a return made of the quantity of grain held in the town he held ten quarters. In the January of this year he contemplated buying some land at Shottery. " Our countriman, Mr. Shaksper," wrote Abraham Sturley to Richard Quineyon January 24th, "is willinge to disburse some monei upon some od yarde land or other att Shotterei or neare about us." It would seem that Shakespeare did not, after all, purchase this land. Perhaps he could not get it a bargain, and what we know of his business transactions, small though it may be, all goes to show that he was a keen dealer and not at all likely to spend his money rashly. This year is remarkable for the ^^Titing of a letter to Shakespeare by Richard Quiney, the only letter ad- dressed to him now in existence. It is dated October 28 A LETTER TO SHAKESPEARE 25th and addressed from Carter Lane, in the City of London. Shakespeare was apparently then at Stratford — " To MY LOVEINGE GOOD FFRENDE AND CONTREY- MANN Mr. Wm. Shackespere dlr thees : " Loveinge Contreyman, I am bolde of yow, as of a ffrende, craveinge yowr helpe with xxx li uppon Mr. Bushell's & my secm-ytee, or Mr. Myttons with me. Mr. Rosswell is nott come to London as yeate, & I have especiall cawse yow shall ffrende me muche in helpeinge me out of all the debettes I owe in London, I thancke god, & muche quiet my mynde wch wolde nott be indebeted. I am nowe towardes the Cowrte, in hope of answer for the dispatche of my Buysenes. Yow shall nether loase credytt nor monney by me, the Lorde wyllinge ; & nowe butt perswade yowrself soe, as I hope, & yow shall not need to feare butt with all hartie thanckefullenes I wyll holde my tyme & con- tent yowr ffrende, & yf we Bargaine farther, yow shalbe the paiem'. yowrselfe. My tyme biddes me hastene to an ende, & soe I commit thys [to] yowr care, & hope of your helpe. I feare I shall nott be backe thys night ffrom the Cowrte. Haste. The Lorde be with yow and with vs all, amen. ffrom the Bell in Carter Lane, the 25th October, 1598. " Yowrs in all kyndnes " Rye. Quyney." There is nothing to show directly what was Shake- speare's reply to this request for the loan of so consider- able a sum ; which, however, was not the personal matter it would seem to be. Quiney was a substantial man, mercer and alderman of Stratford, and was in London, incurring debts in the interests of the town, 29 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND whose law business he was furthering. He wanted nothing for himself. It is curious that this letter Avas discovered among the town's papers, not among any Shakespeare relics, and it is believed was never actually sent after being written ; for another letter is extant, addressed by one of the town council, Abraham Sturley, to Quiney, on November 4th, in which he says : " Ur letter of the 25 October . . . which imported . . . that our countri- man Mr. Wm. Shak. would procure us monei. ..." It would appear, therefore, that on the very day he was writing, Quiney had received assurance from Shake- speare that he would lend. In 1600 Shakespeare's company played before the Queen at Whitehall, and on several occasions in 1602 : their last performance being at Richmond in Surrey on February 2nd, 1603. The following month the great Queen died. In 1602 Shakespeare had been buying land in the neighbourhood of Snitterfield and Welcombe from the Combes ; no less than 107 acres, and in suc- ceeding years he considerably added to it ; further, in July 1605, expending £440 in the purchase of tithes. Early in September 1601, his father, John Shakespeare, had died. Seven years later, also in September, died his mother. In 1607, his eldest daughter, Susanna, married Dr. John Hall, and on the last day of the same year his brother Edmund, an actor, was buried in St. Saviour's, Southwark. It was in 1609 that Shakespeare retired permanently to Stratford. He and his players had been honoured by the new sovereign from the very beginning of his reign ; but Shakespeare now severed his active connection with the stage. In this year his famous Sonnets were published, those sugared verses addressed to his patron, the Eai'l of Southampton, in which he laments having 30 'THE TEMPEST' made himself " a motley to the view." Henceforth he would be a country gentleman and dramatic author, and let who would seek the applause of the crowd. He now wrote the Taming of the Shrew, whose induction is permeated with local allusions ; he bought more land in the neighbourhood of Stratford ; he kept some degree of state at New Place. In 1611 he sold his shares in the theatres, but in 1612 bought property at Black- friars. Thus Shakespeare passed his remaining years. As Rowe, his earliest biographer says, they were spent " as all men of good sense will wish theirs to be ; in ease, retirement, and the conversation of his friends." His last dramatic work. The Tempest, was written in 1611, and bears evidences of being consciously and intentionally his last. It is easily dated, because of the references in it to the " still vex'd Bermoothes," the Bermuda islands, which were discovered by Admiral Sir George Somers' expedition in 1609. The " discovery " was made by the Admiral's ship, the Sea Venture, being driven in a storm on the hitherto unknown islands. The disasters, the adventures, and the strange sights and sounds of the isles were described by Sylvester Jourdain, one of the survivors, in an account published October 1610, called " A Discovery of the Bermudas, otherwise called the Isle of Divels." Shakespearean students find a purposeful solemnity in the treatment of the play, and some perceive in the character of the magician, Prospero, a portraiture of himself, his work done, and with a foreboding of his end, oppressed with a sense of the brief span and the futility of life — " We are such stuff As dreams are made of, and our little life Is rounded with a sleep." 31 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Thus lie brings his labours to an end — " tliis rough magic I liere abjure ; and, when 1 liave required Some lieaveuly music, (whicli even now I do,) . . . I'll break my staff, Bury it certain fathoms in the earth. And", dee])er than did ever plummet sound, I'll drown my book." The retirement of Shakespeare rather curiously synchi'onises with the spread of Puritanism, that slowly accumulating yet irresistible force which, before it had expended its vigour and its wrath was destined to abolish for many years the theatre and the actor's calling, and even to behead a king and work a political revolution. The puritan leaven was working even in Stratford, and in 1602 the town council solemnly de- cided that stage-plays Avere no longer to be allowed, and that any one who permitted them in the town should be fined ten shillings. This edict apparently became a dead letter, but in 1612 it was re-enacted and the penalt}^ raised to £10. We may perhaps here pertinently inquire : Did Shakespeare himself become a Puritan ? Probably so moderate and equable a man as he seems to have been belonged to no extreme party ; but it is to be noted that Dr. John Hall, husband of his eldest daughter, was a Puritan, and that Susanna herself is described in her epitaph as " wise to salvation," which means that she also had found the like grace. In 1614 Shakespeare seems to have entertained a Puritan divine at New Place, according to a somewhat ambiguous account in the Stratford chamberlain's accounts, in which occurs the odd item : " One quart of sack and one quart of claret wine given to the preacher at New Place." If we may measure his preaching by his drinking, he must have delivered poisonously long 32 DEATH OF SHAKESPEARE sermons. But the town council were connoisseurs in sermons, just as the council of forty years earlier had been patrons of the drama ; and they sought out and welcomed preachers, just as their forbears had done with the actors. Only those divines do not seem to have been paid for their services, except in drink. They were all thirsty men, and the council rewarded their orations with the same measure as given to the preacher at New Place. In January 1616, William Shakespeare instructed his solicitor to draft his will. No especial reason for this settlement of his worldly affairs appears to be recorded. In February his daughter Judith was married to Thomas Quiney, vintner, son of that Richard who eighteen years earlier had sought to borrow the £30. In March he was taken ill and the draft will was amended without being fair-copied, a sign, it may be argued, of urgency. It bears date March 25th, and has three of the poet's signatures ; one on each sheet. But he lingered on until April 23rd, dying on the anniversary of his birthday. 33 CHAPTER V Stratford-oii-Avon — It has its own life, quite apart from Shakespearean associations — Its people and its streets — Shakespeare Memorials. Stratford-on-Avon would be an extremely interesting town, both historically and scenically, even without its Shakespearean interest. It does not need association with its greatest son to stand forth easily among other towns of its size and command admiration. It is remarkably unlike the mind's eye picture formed of it by almost every stranger. You expect to see a town of very narrow streets, rather dull perhaps and with little legitimate trade, apart from the sale of picture- postcards, fancy china, guide-books, miniature repro- ductions of the inevitable Shakespeare bust, and the hundred-and-one small articles that tourists buy; but Stratford-on-Avon is not in the least like that. It is true that with a singular lack of humour there is a " Shakespeare Garage," while we all know that Shake- speare never owned a motor-car; that the bust is represented in mosaic over the entrance to the Old Bank, founded in 1810, upon which Shakespeare could never, therefore, have drawn a cheque; and that the Shakespeare Hotel not only bears the honoured name, but also a very large copy of the bust over its porch, and names all its rooms after the plays. Honeymoon couples, I believe, have been given the room called Love's Lahoufs Lost, and Cymbeline, Midsummer Nighfs Dream and many another will astonish the guest at that really very fine and ancient hotel. I forget if there be 34 THE STRATFORDIANS a bedroom named after Two Gentlemen of Verona. If so, it must obviously be one of the double rooms men- tioned in the tariff. They gave me As you Like It, and it was sufficiently comfortable : I liked it much. On the other hand, Macbeth makes one fearful of insomnia. " Macbeth does murder sleep." Not poppy nor mandragora — well, let it be. It is also true that the old market-house, a quaint isolated building of late eighteenth or early nineteenth century standing at the junction of Wood and Henley Streets with Bridge Street, and now a Bank, has for weather-vane the Shakespeare arms and crest of falcon and spear; and it is no less undeniable that the presiding genius of the place has his manifestations in many other directions ; but all these things, together with the several antique furniture and curio shops where the unique articles — of which there is but one each in the world — you purchase to-day are infallibly replaced to-morrow, are for the benefit of the visitor, the stranger and pilgrim. " I was a stranger and ye took me in," I murmured when the absolute replica of the unmatched article I had purchased was unblushingly exposed for sale within a day or two. The Stratfordian notices none of these things : they are there, but they don't concern him. You think they do, and that if a suggestion were made that the town should be renamed " Shakespeare-on-Avon " he would adopt it and be grateful ; but you would be quite wrong ; he would not. If you caught a hundred Stratford people, flagrante delicto, in the pursuit of their daily business and haled them into the Guildhall or other convenient room and set them an examination paper on Shake- speare, no one would pass with honours. Why should any of them ? They have grown up with Shakespeare ; D 2 35 ^,\kf,..,.,f,rrru. I H w H ^ W 05 t3 I o ,! W ^ « I- o S P >; P S H H w H ^ B 03 \A P ■A o w ^ n Q o « ■< fi > M 5 p w o E4 » M H B H O Q ;?; ^ <1 ^ o M w S O !zi W O H > F4 -^' •|J^^ ^ THE 'TUMBLE-DOWN STILE' There are but three kices, or pikes, in the old coat of the Charlecote Lucys. They are displayed, in herald's language, thus : " gules, seinee of crosses crosslet, three luces hauriant argent; " that is to say, on a red ground sown with silver crosses -crosslet, three silver pike in an upright position, rising to take breath. The family motto is " By truth and diligence." On old deeds sealed with the Lucy seal the three pike are shown intertwined. The park, well-wooded, but only about 250 acres in extent, presents a fine picture viewed from these gates, but the mansion is not seen ; the chief approach being a considerable distance along the main road, and thence along a public by-road to the village of Charle- cote. Crossing a bridge over the Wellesbourne stream which joins the Avon in the park, the locally celebrated " Tumble-down Stile " is immediately on the right hand. This is a wooden fence not by its appearance to be distinguished above any other fence of wood, but so contrived that the stranger unversed in its trick, and seeking to climb over it to the footpath beyond, suddenly finds one end collapsing and himself most likely on the ground. This contrivance, generally understood to have been a freak of the late Mr. Henry Spenser Lucy, keeps the village of Charlecote supplied with a stock of elementary humour all the year round, and is invariably pointed out by fly-men driving visitors from Stratford. Not every one who comes to Shakespeare Land comes with the capacity for fully understanding and being interested in its literary and historic features, but all have the comprehension of this within their reach. There, on the left, stretches the woodland park, entered either by a rough five -barred rustic gate, or by the imposing modern ornamental gates flanked by clumsy sculptured effigies of boars squatting on their 121 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND nimps. Entering by the unpretending gate first named, one comes beneath the trees of a noble avenue to the beautiful gatehouse standing in advance of the hall and giving admission to a courtyard filled with the geometrical patterns of a formal garden. The wild verdure of the park reigns here, outside that enclosure, and trim neatness forms the note within ; a contrast greatly loved in those times when Charlecotc was planned. It was to the planning of country mansions exactly what the antithetic manner is to literature : both give the spice of sharp contrast. There are to this day deer couching in the bracken of the park, and they come picturesquely up to the gate- house and peer within. There are also strange piebald sheep, with long fat tails, very curious to look upon. I do not know what breed they are, or whence they come, for the reply received to an inquiry elicited this strange answer from a typical Warwickshire boy: " Thaay be Spanish sheep from Scotland." Possibly some of those who read these pages may recognise the kind ; but if they came from Spain to Charlecote by way of Scotland they must have been brought somewhat out of their way. The gatehouse, so strikingly set in advance of the mansion, is the most truly picturesque feature. Its red brick and stone have not been restored, and wear all those signs of age which have been largely smoothed out and obliterated from the residence. Charlecote is not what is known as a " show house." It is not one of those stately mansions which are open to be viewed at stated times ; and strangers are admitted only occasionally and by special grace. Long bygone generations of Lucys hang in portraitures by famous masters upon the walls of the great hall, the library, and the drawing-room ; and the library contains a copy 122 CHARLECOTE CHURCH of the Merry Wives of Windsor, published in 1619; an edition which does not contain the opening scene with Mr. Justice Shallow. Charlecote church was entirely rebuilt in 1852. Surviving views of the former church prove it to have been a small, mean building, unworthy of housing the THE GATEHOUSE, CHARLECOTE. fine tombs of the Lucys ; and so we need not regret the rebuilding, except to be sorry it was not deferred a few years longer, until the efflorescent would-be Gothic of that period had abated. You who gaze upon the exterior of Charlecote can have not the least doubt about the enthusiasm of the designer, who seems to have been even more Gothic than the architects of the Middle Ages. It is a small church he has designed, but the exterior is overloaded with ornament ; and if the building be indeed 123 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND small, the gargoyles are big enough for a cathedral, while the interor has a niiich-more-than Middle Ages obscurity. It is a church of nave without aisles, and the nave has the unusual feature of being vaulted in stone. It is dark even on a summer day. The architect was also the designer of Bodelwyddan church, in North Wales. North of the chancel, in a very twilight chapel, are the three ornate tombs of the Lucys. The first of these is of that Sir Thomas who was Shakespeare's " Justice Shallow." It is on the right hand. He lies there, in armoured effigy, beside his wife Joyce, who predeceased him in 1595. He survived until 1600. His bearded face has good features, and he certainly does not in any way look the part of Shallow. Nor does the noble tribute to his wife, inscribed above the monument, proclaim him other than a noble and modest knight — Here entombed lyetli the Lady Joyce Liicy^ wife of Sir Thomas Lucy, of Cliarlecote, in the county of Warwick, knight, daughter and heir of Thomas Acton, of Sutton, in the county of Worcester, Esquire, who departed out of this wretched workl to lier Heavenly Kingdom the 10th day of February, in the year of our Lord God, 1595, of her age Ix. and iii. All tlie time of lier lyfe, a true and faithful servant of her goo(i' li W ' CHARLEGOTE. effigies of their children, each represented kneeling on his or her little hassock, decorates the front of the monument. There are six sons and eight daughters, earnestly praying. The third and last tomb is that of yet another Sir Thomas, third son and successor of the last named. He was killed by a fall from his horse in 1640. He is sculptured beautifully in white marble, and is represented reclining on his elbow. He bears a strong resemblance 125 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND to Charles the First. Beneath is the equally fine effigy of his wife Alice — a lovely work. She is wearing a chain like that of an Order, with a very large and prominent locket, or badge, about the size of an egg, which is, however, quite plain. The significance of it has been wholly lost. On either side of Sir Thomas are panels sculptured in relief : on the left a representation of him galloping on horseback, and on the right shelves of classic authors, possibly to indicate that he was a man of culture and refinement. This beautiful monument was executed in Rome, by Bernini, to the order of Lady Lucy, at a cost of 1500 guineas. The exterior of this modern church is rapidly weather- ing, and the over-rich carving of it is being rigorously searched by rains, frosts and thaws. It will be better for sloughing off these florid adornments. 126 CHAPTER XIII Shakespeare tlie countryman. We have abundant evidence of Shakespeare the country- man in his works, and of the Warwickshire man some evidences, too. In the splendid speech of the Duke of Burgundy, in Henry the Fifth, he makes the Frenchman talk with an appreciation of agricultural disaster which only an English farmer, and aWarwickshire or Gloucester- shire farmer, too, could show. In the miseries of France, worsted by war, the Duke speaks thus — "Her vine, the merry clieerer of the heart, Unprunud dies : her hedg'es even-pleach'd, Like prisoners vvihlly overj^-rown with hair. Put forth disorder'd twigs : lier fellow leas The darnel, hemlock, and rank fumitory, Doth root upon ; while that the coulter rusts That should deracinate such savagery : The even mead, that erst brought sweetly fortli The freckled cowslij), burnet, and green clover. Wanting the scythe, all uncorrected, rank. Conceives by idleness ; and nothing teems But hateful docks, rough thistles, kecksies, burs. Losing both beauty and utility." Bacon would not have made a Frenchman speak with so English a tongue, in the way of the Midlands, nor could he if he would, for he knew no more than the real Burgundy could have known, those details of agri- cultural life ; and he certainly could not have identified a " kecksie," or a " keck," as the Warwickshire children still call the hemlock, of whose dried stems they make whistles. 127 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND " Easy it is of a cut loaf to steal a shive, we know," says Demetrius, in Titus Andronicus. That ancient Roman is made to talk like any Warwickshire agricultural labourer who takes his lunch in the hedgerow, off a " shive o' bread, a bit o' cheese or baacon and a drap o' summat ; maybe a tot o' cider or maybe a mug of ale." After which he will " shog off" to work again; using in that local word " shog " the expression Shakespeare places in the mouth of Nym, in Henry the Fifth. At the close of the day he will be " fore wearied," as King John describes himself. In his plays Shakespeare follows the year all round the calendar and touches every season M'ith magic. You feel convinced, from the sympathy, the joyousness, and the intimate touches, of his country scenes that he was a rustic at heart, and that he must have longed, during those many years when he was winning success in London, to return not only to his native place — to which the heart of every one turns fondly — but to the meadows, the cornfields, the hills and dales and the wild flowers around the town of Stratford-on-Avon. There again, when spring was come, to hear "the sweet bird's note," whether it were " the throstle with his note so true," " the ousel cock so black of hue, with orange tawny bill," " the wren with little quill; " "The fiucli, the sparrow, and the lark. The plain-song cuckoo gray^" or better still the mad joyous outbursts of the skylarks' songs (" And merry larks are ploughmen's clocks ") in those wide horizons in May : these, you are certain, were Shakespeare's ideals. Of all the seasons, although he writes sympathetically of every one, Shakespeare best loved the spring. He is not exceptional in that, for it is the season of hope 128 SHAKESPEARE AND SPRING and promise, when the risen sap in the trees makes the leaves unfold and the buds unsheath their beauties, when beasts and birds respond to the climatic change and hibernating small creatures and insects awake from their long sleep ; and no less than the trees and plants, the animals and insects, all mankind finds a renewal of life. "It was a lover and liis lass, With a hey and a lio, and a hey nonino^ That o'er the green cornfield did pass In the spring-time, tlie only merry ring-time, AVhen birds do sing, hey ding-a-ding ding. Sweet lovers love the spring." Thus the pages sung in the Forest of Ai-den; and Shakespeare, be sure, put something of himself into the character of Autolycus the pedlar, who after all was a man of better observation, judging by his song, than rogues of his sort commonly be — " When daffodils begin to peer, — With hey ! the doxy over the dale, — Why, then comes in the sweet o' the year ; For tlie red blood reigns in the winter's pale. The white sheet bleacliing on the hedge, — AV^ith hey ! the sweet birds, O how they sing ! — Doth set my pugging tooth on edge ; For a quart of ale is a dish for a king. The lark that tirra-lirra cliants, — With hey! with hey! the thrush and the jay: — Are summer songs for me and my aunts, While we lie tumbling in the hay." Shakespeare, we like to think, had the tenderest feeling for those same daffodils with which Autolycus begins his song ; for in lines that are among the most beautiful he ever wi'ote, he makes Perdita speak of — " Daffodils, That come before the swallow dares, and take The winds of March with beauty.' K 129 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Here we find, not for once only, Shakespeare and that other sweet singer, Herrick, curiously in sympathy — " Sweet daffodils, we weep to see You haste away so soon." He does not care so ardently for the rose, although he seems, rather indifferently it is true, to admit that it is the queen of flowers. But it delays until summer is upon us. It does not dare with the daffodil. He returns again and again to the more idyllic simple flowers of nature that the gardener takes no account of. He paints the cowslips in a few words of close observa- tion. They are Queen Mab's pensioners — "The cowslips tall her pensioners be; In their gold coats spots you see ; Those be rubies, fairy favours. In those freckles live their savours." And in every cowslip's ear the fairy hangs a pearl, from her harvest of dew-drops. Shakespeare's Warwickshire was rich — and it is so still, although it is a very much more enclosed country- side than in his day — in wild-flowers ; the gillyflower, the wallflower that loves the nooks and crannies of ruined walls as much as does the jackdaw ; the candy-tuft, the foxglove that still stands like a tall floral sentinel in many a hedgerow around Snitterfield ; with many another. " Here's flowers for you ; Hot lavender, mints, savory, marjoram. The marigold, that goes to bed with the sun." The " flowers," however, mentioned in that quotation are, with one exception, herbs. Such as they grace and make fragrant the old gardens of many a cottage the casual tourist never sees. There they have grown for generations, in great clumps and beds ; not in meagre and formal patches, as in some " Shakespearean gardens" 130 OLD-FASHIONED FLOWERS that could be named. In the byways, in short, where thmgs are not consciously on show, everything is, paradoxically enough, better worth seeing. There the homely virtues of the people are better displayed ; the flowers are brighter and their scent sweeter ; and there the sun is more mellow. In the byways old mossy walls still stand, russet brown and sere in drought, as though the moss were a dead thing, but green again so soon as ever the rain comes ; and old roofs bear the fleshy house-leek in great patches, as though they had burst into some strange vegetable elephantiasis. That is Warwickshire as it is off the beaten track, yonder, at the horizon, where the sky meets the earth : a vague direction, I fancy, but sufficient. We must not divulge all things. The ragged-robbin that blooms later in every hedge ; the " crow-flower " as Shakespeare names it; the " long- purple," otherwise the wild arum; pansies — " that's for thoughts " — some call them " love-in-idleness " ; all figure in Hamlet, where you find a good deal of old country folklore in Ophelia's talk. " Rosemary, that's for remembrance"; fennel and columbines: "there's rue for you ; and here's some for me ; we may call it herb of grace o' Sundays ; — you may wear your rue with a difference." There is sometimes an almost farmer-like practical philosophy underlying his observation, as where Biron says, in Love's Labour^ s Lost : " Allons allons ! sow'd cockle reap'd no corn " ; and in King Lear, in the refer- ence to — " Darnel^ and all the idle weeds that grow In our sustaining corn." The corn-cockle is of course better known as the " corn- flower," whose beautiful blue is so contrasting a colour K 2 131 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND with the scarlet of the poppies, that equally fail to win the farmer's admiration. But the greater the study we give to Shakespeare and his treatinent of flowers, the more evident it becomes that his sympathies were all with the earlier, spring- time blossoms that dare, not quite with the daffodils, but soon after the roaring ides of March are overpast. Thus, he makes Perdita resume, with — " Violets dim. But sweeter tliau the lids of Juno's eyes Or Cj'tlierea's breatli ; pale primroses That die unmarried ere they can behold Bright Phcebus in his strength." The " daisies pied," the " lady-smocks all silver-white," that is to say, the white arabis which the Warwickshire children of to-day call " smell-smocks," and the " cuckoo buds of yellow hue," otherwise the buttercups, out of which the cuckoo is in old folklore supposed to drink, he tells us, all " paint the meadows with delight." He could never have written those lines with care and thought and in cold blood : he must have seen those meadows with all the delight he expresses, and the words themselves must needs have been penned with enthusiasm. This is a thesis easily susceptible of proof. The lovely cuckoo-song at the close of Love's Labour's Lost, which with a charm unmatched tells us of those flower -spangled meads, has no bearing upon the action of the play : it is written in sheer enjoyment, and it is in the same spirit that his other allusions to the fields and hedgerows and woodlands, the " bosky acres " and the " unshrubbed down," are conceived. Ariel, that tricksy sprite of The Temyest, is a true countryman's fancy, as clearly to be seen in the lines — ''Where the bee sucks, there suck I, In a cowslip's bell I lie ; There I couch when owls do cry, On the bat's back I do fly." 132 THE DINGLES Here, as often elsewhere, the dramatist and the poet are at odds. Shakespeare the actor-play \vi'ight, with every necessity of the stage — its entrances and exits, and the imperative need for the action of the play to be maintained — halts the story so that the other Shake- speare, the idyllic poet, the lover of nature, shall picture some scene for which he cares everything, but which to the Greeks — for Greeks here read the London play- goers of his time — must have meant foolishness. Such an instance, among many, is Oberon's speech to Puck, in Midsummer Nighfs Dream — "I know a bank whereon the wihl thyme blows, ^V^here ox-lips and the nodding violet grows ; Quite over-canopied with lush woodbine, With sweet musk-roses, and with eglantine : There sleeps Titania." For these lines and such as these Shakespeare risked the brickbats, the cat-calls and the obloquy that awaited the dramatist whose action dragged. There is no excuse for them — except that of their beauty, and that to the groundlings was less than nothing. That bank whereon the wild-thyme grew must have been, I like to think, somewhere in The Dingles, a curious spot just north-east of Stratford, to the left of the Warwick road, as you go up to Welcombe. I think there are no " dingles " anywhere nearer London than the midlands ; none in name, although there may be many in fact. By a " dingle " in the midlands a deep narrow vale, or natural gully is meant. The word is especially well known in Shropshire and the Welsh borders, where such features, between the enfolding hills, are plentiful. Here The Dingles are abrupt and deeply winding gullies, breaking away from the red earth of the Welcombe uplands : a very tumbled and unspoiled spot. Elms look down from the crest of 133 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND them, and ancient thorn-trees line their sides. It seems quite a sure and certain thing that Shakespeare when a boy knew this spot well and frequented it with the other Stratford boys of his age ; catching, perhaps the " earth-delving conies," and I am afraid — for all boys are cruel except those in the Sunday-school books, and they are creatures in the nature of sucking Galahads imagined by maiden aunts — I am afraid, I say, also birds '-nesting. The Dingles, doubtless, formed in Shakespeare's mind the site of Titania's bower. Perhaps you may find it yourself, if you seek there, somewhere about midsummer midnight, in the full of the moon, when possibly her obedient fairies will be as kind and courteous as of old to that gentleman who has the good fortune to discover the magic spot, and may — " Hop in his walks, and gaml)ol in liis eyes ; Feed liim witli apricocks and dewVjerries, AFith jjurple grapes, green iigs^ and mulberries." If these adventures do befall you, tell no one ; for you will not find belief, even in this same Shakespeare land. It is, however, much more likely that your walk will be solitary, and that for the apricots and grapes you will have to wait until you have returned to your hotel in the town. The last two years of Shakespeare's life were concerned with a heated local question : none other than that of the proposed enclosure of the Welcombe common fields, including The Dingles, by William Combe who had by the death of his father become squire of Welcombe and had at once entered into an agreement with the lord of the manor and other landholders to enclose the land. The corporation and townsfolk of Stratford were bitterly opposed to this encroachment. Shakespeare's interest in the matter appears to have been only that 134 THE LAND-GRABBERS of an owner of tithes in these fields, and his sympathies were clearly against any such extension of private rights. An entry under date of September 1615 among others in the still-existing manuscript diary of Thomas Greene, then clerk to the corporation, who calls Shake- speare his cousin, is to the effect that Shakespeare told J. Greene (brother of the town clerk) that he — Shake- speare — " was not able to bear the enclosing of Wel- combe." The ambiguous and ungrammatical wording of Greene's diary often renders his meaning obscure and has caused a great conflict of opinion about Shake- speare's attitude in this affair, some reading it as in favour of the enclosure. It really appears to have been one of benevolent neutrality, and could scarcely have been otherwise. He himself was a neighbouring landowner, and friendly with others, but sentimentally, he looked with aversion upon those proposed doings. He " was not able to bear " the enclosure of the place he had roamed when a boy, but that did not give him the right to intervene at law. The corporation went to law with Combe and his fellows and won their case, but by that time Shakespeare had passed from these transient scenes. To this day The Dingles is common land. 135 CHAPTER XIV The 'Eight Villages' — 'Piping' Pebworth and 'Dancing' Marston. No one who has ever sojourned in Shakespeare land can remain in ignorance of what are the " Eight Villages." The older rhymes upon them are printed upon picture- postcards, and on fancy chinaware, and reprinted in every local guide-book; and now I propose to repeat them, not only for their own sake and for the alleged Shakespearean authorship, but because the pilgrimage of those villages offers many points of interest. One need offer no excuse for this descriptive chapter, because although the rhymes themselves are trite, the places are by no means so well known; your average Shakespeare Country tourist being rarely so enterprising as he is commonly — and quite erroneously — supposed to be. Stratford-on-Avon, Evesham, Warwick, Kenilworth and Coventry, with their comfortable hotels, furnish forth the average pilgrim. But if you are to know Shakespeare land intimately, and if you would come into near touch with the poet and know him at closest quarters, you must linger in the villages that in every circumstance of picturesqueness are dotted about the valley of the Avon. There, as freshly as ever, when spring has not waned too far into sunnner, the '•' Daisies pied and violets blue, And ladysmocks all silver-white, And cuckoo-buds of yellow hue, Do paint the meadows with delight." " Shakespeare is Bacon," dogmatically asserts the 136 THE TOPERS AND THE SIPPERS ancient hyphenated baronet who in these latter days posts pamphlets broadcast (incidentally favouring me with one, uninvited) seeking to dethrone our sovereign bard. Well, let who will cherish the impious opinion ; but all the countryside around Stratford disproves it; the trees, the fields, the wild flowers, the rustic talk, which Bacon could never have known, that are all faithfully mirrored in the plays. But let us to the Eight Villages, whose fame rests upon a legend of olden drinking-bouts and of competi- tions between different towns and villages, to decide whose men could drink the most liquor. In Shake- speare's time, it seems, Bidford held the championship of all this countryside, and had two valiant coteries of tipplers who drank not only for their own personal gratification, but went beyond that and inconvenienced themselves for the honour and glory of their native place. Further than this, local patriotism cannot go. So famous were the doings of the Topers and the Sip- pers of this spot that it became familiarly known as "Drunken" Bidford; an unfortunate adjective, for it was bestowed not by any means because those convivial clubmen could not carry their liquor like men, but was intended as a direct tribute of admiration to their capacity for it. In short, such was their prowess that they went forth, conquering and to conquer, in all the surrounding villages. On an historic occasion the daring fellows of Stratford went forth and challenged the Bidford inen on their own ground, Shakespeare tradition- ally among them. The Topers were not at home ; they had gone to drink Evesham dry ; but the Sippers held the fort and duly maintained the honour of Bidford. At the " Falcon " inn the contest was waged, and the Stratford inen were ignominiously worsted, drawing off from the stricken field while yet there remained some 137 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND with full command of their legs, and ability to carry away those of their number who had wholly succumbed. In this sort they went the homeward way towards Strat- ford, which is more than six miles distant, but they had proceeded no further than three-quarters of a mile when they sank down by the roadside and slept there the night, under a large crab-apple tree. When morning dawned — when night's candles were burned out and jocund day stood tiptoe on the meadows — they arose refreshed, the majority eager to return to Bidford and try another bout; but Shakespeare refused. He had had enough of it. He had drunk with — " Vi\ni\g Pebwortli^ Dancing Marston, Haunted Hillboronfjli, Hungry Grafton, Dodging- Exhall, Papist Wixford, Beggarly Broom, and Drunken Bidford." Such is the legend. There are those who believe it, and there are again those who do not. The quatrain does not seem to fit in with the story, and indeed bears evidence of being one of those injurious rhymes respect- ing neighbouring and rival villages fairly common throughout England, often reflecting severely, not only upon the characteristics of those places, but also upon the moral character of their inhabitants. Indeed, the present rhymes are mildness itself compared with some, with which these pure pages shall not be sullied. But although we may not place much faith in the Shake- spearean ascription, those go, surely, too far who refuse to believe Shakespeare capable of taking part in one of these old-time drinking-bouts. Shakespeare, we are nowadays told, could not have descended to such conduct ; but in holding such a view we judge the poet and the times in which he lived by the standards of our own age ; a very gross fallacy indeed. It is not, nowa- days, " respectable " for any one, no matter the height 138 PIPING PEBWORTH or the obscurity of his status, to drink more than enough; but he who in those times shirked his drink was accounted a very sorry fellow. What says Sir Toby Belch, in Twelfth Night ? " He is a coward and a coystril that will not drink till his brains turn o' the toe like a parish top." To this day, in the banqueting-room of Haddon Hall, we may see what the jovial souls who were contemporary with Shakespeare did to the man who could not or would not finish his tankard. There is an ingenious handcuff in the panelling of that apartment in which the wrist of such an one was secured, and down his sleeve the drink he had declined was poured. Nay, only a hundred and fifty years ago, the hospitable hosts and the best of good fellows were those to whom it was a point of honour to see that their guests were made, in the modern police phrase, " drunk and incapable," so that they had to be carried up to bed. Mr. Pitt did not commonly get much " forrarder " on three bottles of port, and generally made his best speeches in the House when, having generously exceeded that allowance, he was quite drunk. Mr. Fox was a worthy fellow to him. Nobod}^ thought the worse of them — in fact, rather the better — for it. To be drunk was the mark of a gentle- man ; to be excessively drunk — the very apogee of inebriety — was to be " as drunk as a lord " ; no man could do more. The villages whose bygone outstanding features are thus rhythmically celebrated are scattered to the west and south-west of Stratford-on-Avon, between six and eight miles distant; the two first-named in that wide- spreading level which stretches almost uninterruptedly between that town and Evesham. Pebworth, whose name would seem to enshrine the personal name of some Saxon landowner — ^" Pebba's weorth " — is quite excep- tionally placed on a steep and sudden hill that rises rather 139 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND dramatically from the level champaign. There is more than a thought too much of new building and of corru- gated tin roofing about the Pebworth of to-day, and when I came up along the village street a steam-roller was engaged in compacting the macadam of the roadway. I thought sadly that it was not at all Shakespearean; yet, you know, had the roads been of your true Shake- ^^^. ^^■^^T\_ PIPING PEBWORTH. spearean early seventeenth-century sort, one would not have penetrated to these scenes with a bicycle at all. No one pipes nowadays at Pebworth; there is not even a performer on the penny whistle to sound a note, in evidence of good faith. It is a pretty enough village, but not remarkably so, and offers the illustrator the smallest of chances, for the church which crowns the hill-top is so encircled with trees that only the upper part of its tower is visible. The church, in common with nearly all the village churches within the Shakespeare 140 DANCING MARSTON radius, is locked, doubtless with a view to extracting a sixpence from the amiable tourist. Old tombstones to a Shackel, Shekel or Shackle family — the name is spelled in many ways — abound here. Long Marston lies in the midst of this pleasant, level country, six miles south-west of Stratford-on-Avon, and on a yet somewhat secluded road; its old-time retire- ment that recommended it to the advisers of the fugitive Charles the Second, when seeking a way for him to escape from the country after the defeat of his hopes at the Battle of Worcester, September 3rd, 1651, being little changed. Marston is the only village I have ever known which owns three adjectives to its name. " Long," Marston is the better known of them; "Dancing" Marston is another, and " Dry " Marston — or " Marston Sicca," as the pedantic old topographers of some two centuries ago styled it — forms the third. Whatever fitness may once have attached to the sobriquet of " Dancing " has long since disappeared, nor are the traditions of its olden morris-dancers one whit more marked than those of any other village. In the days when Marston danced, the neighbouring villages footed it with equally light heart and light heels, so far as we can tell. " Dry " Marston, too, forms something of a puzzle to the observer, who notes not only that it is low- lying and that the little Dorsington Brook meanders close at hand on the map, in company with other rills, but also observes that a stone-paved causeway extends for a considerable distance along the road at the northern end of the village; evidently provided against flooded and muddy ways. Finally, if " Marston " does not derive from " marshtown," then there is nothing at all in derivatives. We are thus reduced to the better-known name, " Long " Marston. Doubtless the stranger expects to find a considerable 141 CHARLES THE SECOND village, with a long-drawn street of cottages; but Marston is not in the least like that. Instead, you find ancient half-timbered and thatched cottages, scattered singly, or in groups of two or three, fronting upon the level road, each situated in its large garden, where it seems as much a product of the soil as the apples and pears, or the more homely cabbages, beans, and potatoes, and appears almost to have grown there, equally with them. A branch line of the Great Western Railway, it is true, runs by, with a station, but at Long Marston station the world goes easily and leisurely ; sparrows chirp in the waiting-room and rabbits sport along the line; while such work as goes on in the goods-yard is punctu- ated by yawns and illuminative anecdotes. All this by way of praising these old-world surroundings. Among the cottages is an older whitewashed group, set back from the road. Li pre-Reformation times this was the Priest's House. Across the way stands the pretty little fourteenth -century church, with little of interest within, but possessing a fine timbered north porch of the same period, the timbering at this present time of wi'iting being again exposed to view after having been covered up with plaster for more than a century. It was on the evening of September 10th, the seventh day after the disastrous Battle of Worcester, that King Charles and his two companions, Mr. Lassels and Jane Lane, came to Long Marston and found shelter at the house of Mr. John Tomes. The King was in the character of " Will Jackson," servant of Mistress Jane Lane ; in that capacity riding horseback in front of her, while she rode pillion behind him. We may readily picture the King, in his serva,.nt's disguise, kept in his proper j)lace in the kitchen, while Lassels and Jane Lane were entertained by the master of the house in the best parlour. Blount, in his Boscobel, published in 1660, the 143 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND year of the Restoration, illuminates this historic incident with an anecdote that gives the brief sojourn at Long Marston as piquant and homely a savour as that of King Alfred's burning the cakes in the cottage where he was in hiding, away down in the Somersetshire Isle of Athelney, nearly eight hundred years before the troubles of the Stuarts were heard of. Supper was being prepared for Mr. Tomes' guests, and the cook asked " Will Jackson " to wind up the roasting-jack. " Will Jack- son," says Blount, " was obedient, and attempted it, but hit not the right way, which made the maid in some passion ask, ' What countryman are you, that you know not how to wind up a jack ? ' To which Charles, who was ever blessed with that happy quality the French call esprit, for which we have no exactly corresponding word, replied, ' I am a poor tenant's son of Colonel Lane, in Staffordshire ; we seldom have roast meat, and when we have, we don't make use of a jack.' " Every one in Long Marston can point out " King's Lodge," as this historic house is now known. Somewhat altered, externally and internally, but still in possession of descendants of the John Tomes who sheltered the King after Worcester Fight, it still retains the famous roasting-jack, now carefully preserved in a glass-case, in the room that was in those times a kitchen, and later became a cider cellar, and is now the dining-room. The Tomes family — who pronounce their name " Tombs," and have many kinsfolk who also spell it in that fashion — have a curious and dismal pictorial pun upon their ancient patronymic, by way of coat of arms. It represents three white altar tombs on a green ground ; to speak in the language of heraldry : Vert, three tomb- stones argent. John Tomes suffered for his loyalty. Some of his lands were sequestrated and he was obliged to leave the 144 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND country; nor did the Royal favour subsequently shown his family advantage them very greatly; the liberty granted them of hunting, hawking and fishing from Long Marston to Crab's Cross, in the neighbourhood of Redditch, being, it may well be supposed, of little value. Although, as already noted, changes have been made at " King's Lodge," one may yet, in the quaint dining- room which was then the kitchen, sit in the ingle-nook of the great fireplace, in which it may be supposed " Will Jackson," having doubtless kissed the cook — if indeed, she were a kissable cook — and thus made amends for his unhandiness with the roasting-jack, was afterwards allowed a seat. 146 CHAPTER XV Tlie ' Eight Villages ' {concluded). ' Haunted ' Hillborougli, ' Hungry ' Grafton, 'Dodging' Exhall, 'Papist' Wixford, ' Beggarly ' Broom, and ' Drunken ' Bidford. " Haunted Hillborough," which comes next in order in this rhymed survey, is geographically remote from Long Marston, not so much in mere mileage, for it is not quite three miles distant, measured in a straight line, but it is situated on the other, and Warwickshire, side of the Avon, at a point where the river is not bridged. In short, the traveller from Long Marston to Hillborough will scarcely perform the journey under six miles, going by way of Dorsington and Barton, always along crooked roads, and thence through Bidford. Dorsington is an entirely pretty and extremely small village with a church noticeable only for the whimsical smallness of its red-brick Georgian tower. Why, in a lesser-known local rhyme, which does not find celebrity upon postcards and fancy articles at Stratford-on-Avon, Dorsington should be known as " Daft " is more than I can say; unless it be that the facile alliteration is irresistible. There are reasons sufficient for this lack of popularity, in the lines in which Dorsington's name occurs — " Daft Dorsington, Lousy Luddington, \\'^elford for witches, Binton for bitches, An' Weston at th' end of th' 'orld." Barton, through which we come into Bidford, is, as might perhaps be suspected from its name, merely a L 2 147 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND rustic hamlet, for " barton "is but the old English word for a cow-byre or a barn. It is that " Burton Heath " mentioned in the Taming of the Shrew, of which Chris- topher Sly, " old Sly's son," " by birth a pedlar, by education a card-maker, by transmutation a bear -herd, and now by present profession a tinker," was a native. From Barton we cross the Avon into Bidford over an ancient bridge of eight arches built in 1482 by the brethren of Alcester priory to replace the ford by which travellers along the Ryknield Street had up to that time crossed the river. The eight arches of Bidford achieve the rather difficult feat of being each of a different shape and size, and the heavy stonework itself has been extensively patched with brick. Here the Avon is encumbered with eyots and rushes, very destructive to the navigation, but affording very useful foregrounds for the illustrator. Bidford is wholly on the further, or Warwickshire, side of the river, and is a rather urban-looking place of one very long and narrow street. It has a population of over a thousand, and thus, I believe, comes under the official deffiiition of a " populous place," whose inns and public-houses are permitted to remain open until 11 p.m., which may or may not be a consideration here. The inns of Bidford are numerous, but they do not appear to enjoy their former prosperity. I adventured into one of them one thirsty summer day, for the purpose of sampling some of the " perry " advertised for sale within. There was no joy in the sour sorry stuff it proved to be. You get quite a quantity of it for three- halfpence ; but it is odds against your drinking half of it. The landlady dolefully spoke of the state of trade. She had not taken half-a-crown that day. Truly, the glories of Bidford have departed ! The old " Falcon " inn, an inn no longer, nor for 148 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND many years past, stands in the midst of this very considerable village, close by the parish church, whose odd and not beautiful tower forms a prominent object in the view from the bridge. It is not in the least worth while to enter that church, for it has been almost wholly rebuilt. The nave has a ceiling, and there are deal doors, painted and grained to resemble oak. The chancel, reconstructed in the more florid and unre- -p,*i^'*^.^_^ THK FALCON, BIDFORD. strained period of the Gothic revival, is a lamentable specimen of architectural zeal not according to discretion. It is nearly a century since the " Falcon " ceased to be an inn. It then became a workhouse, and thus many a boozy old reprobate whose courses at the " Falcon " had brought him to poverty ended his days under the same roof. Cynic Fortune, turned moralist and temper- ance lecturer, surely was never in a more saturnine humour ! The old sign of the inn eventually found its way to Shakespeare's birthplace. It pictured a golden falcon on a red ground, and bore additionally the arms of 150 ,^,' > {ifi^ -\h %5i5^*^*si_- 'rt^^^ SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the Skipwith family, the chief landowners in Bidford. With the sign went an old chair in which Shakespeare is traditionally said to have sat. To-day the " Falcon " is let in tenements, and also houses the village reading- room and library. The building deserves a better fate, for, as will be noted from the accompanying illustration, it has that quality, as admirable in architecture as in men, character. It is of two distinct styles : the half- timbered gable noted along the street being doubtless the oldest portion, apparently of the mid-fifteenth century. This would seem to be the original inn. The main block seems to be about a century later, and would thus have been a recent building in Shakespeare's youth. It was added apparently at a period of un- bounded prosperity and is wholly of stone. The stone is of that very markedly striated blue lias much used in this district, and is set in a traditional fashion once greatly followed, that is to say, in alternate narrow and broad bands or courses. Proceeding from Bidford along the Stratford road for Hillborough the haunted, the site of the ancient crab-apple tree is found, where the defeated Stratfordians slept off the effects of their carouse. The road is hedged now and the fields enclosed and cultivated, but in Shakespeare's time the way was open. The spot is marked on Ordnance maps as " Shakespeare's Crab," and although the ancient tree finally disappeared in a venerable age on December 4th, 1824, when its remains, shattered in storms and hacked by relic-hunters, were carted off to Bidford Grange, a younger tree of the same genus has been planted on the identical site. We may note the spot, interested and unashamed, because although the rhymes upon the eight villages are almost certainly not Shakespeare's — though probably quite as old as his period — that is no reason for doubting the 152 HAUNTED HILLBOROUGH poet's taking part in the drinking contest. " Because thou art virtuous, shall there be no cakes and ale ? " and because we do not follow the customs of our ancestors shall we think them in their generation — and Shake- speare with them — disreputable ? I think not, although, with these things in mind, I live in daily expectation of an article in some popular journal, asking, " Was Shakespeare Respectable ? " I think the poet was, "HAUNTED HILLBOROUGH." apart from his literary genius, an average man, with the weaknesses of such ; and all the more lovable for it. Hillborough is reached by turning in a further mile to the right, off the high road, at a point where a meadow is situated locally known as " Palmer's Piece." Palmer, it appears, was a farmer who drowned his wife in the Avon, and was gibbeted on this spot for the crime. A mile's journey along narrow roads, down towards the river, brings the pilgrim to Hillborough. Now Hillborough is not a village : it is not even a hamlet, 153 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND and is indeed nothing but the remaining mng of an old manor-house, now a farm, and in a very sohtary situa- tion. It -v^ill thunder and hghten, and rain heavily when you go to Hillborough — it always does when you seek interesting j^laces in remote spots — but these conditions seem only the more appropriate to the haunted reputation of the scene ; although what was the nature of the hauntings has eluded every possible inquiry. i J "■ HUNGRY GRAFTON." It is thus curiously and wholly in keeping that the old manor-house and its surroundings should look so eerie. Noble trees romantically overhang the house ; remains of old buildings whose disappearance mournful ghosts might grieve over, lend a dilapidated air of the Has Been to the place ; and an ancient circular stone pigeon- house, a relic of the former manor, stands beside a dismal pond. But the ghosts have ceased to walk. A mile and a half across the Stratford road, is situated the fourth of these eight villages, " Hungry " Grafton. The real name of the place is Temple Grafton. "Hungry " 154 HUNGRY GRAFTON is said to be an allusion to a supposed poverty of the soil, but farmers of this neighbourhood, although fully as dissatisfied as you expect a farmer to be, do not lend much help to the stranger seeking information. " I've varmed wuss land an' I've varmed better," was the eminently non-committal reply of one ; while another was of the opinion that " it 'on't break us, nor yet it 'on't make us." The Shakespearean tourist will not be pleased with Grafton, for the squire of the adjoining Grafton Court practically rebuilt the whole village some forty years ago. It is true that was not a heroic undertaking, for it is a small village, but the doing of it very effectually quenches the traveller's enthusiasm. Even the church was rebuilt in 1875 : a peculiarly unfortunate thing, because the old building was one of those for which claim was made for having beenthe scene of Shakespeare's marriage, that elusive ceremony of which no register survives to bear witness. It is only in practical, un- sentimental England that these things are at all possible. A furious desire to obliterate every possible Shakespearean landmark would almost seem to have possessed the people of the locality, until quite recent years. Grafton, whose " Temple " prefix derives from the manor having anciently been one of the possessions of the Knights Templar, stands on a hill. The site is thought to have been covered in olden times with scrub-woods, " Grafton " or " Greveton," taking its name from " greves " ; a word signifying underwoods. Similar place-names are found in Northamptonshire, in Grafton Regis and Grafton Underwood, situated in Whittlebury Forest. The only possible picture in " Hungry " Grafton is that sketched here, from below the ridge, where a brook runs beneath the road, beside a group of red-brick 155 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND cottages. If you ascend the road indicated here and pass the highly uninteresting church and schools, you come to the hamlet of Ardens Grafton, a very much more gracious and picturesque place, although in ex- tremely tumbledown and dilapidated circumstances. It is very much of a woodland hamlet, and appears to owe the first part of its name rather to that circum- stance than to ownership at any time by the Arden THE HOLLOW ROAD, EXHALL. family : Ardens in this case signifying a height over- looking a wooded Vale. The situation of the place does in fact most aptly illustrate the derivation, for it stands upon a very remarkable ridge, which must needs be descended by a steep and sudden hill if we want to reach Exhall. Descending the almost precipitous and narrow road with surprise, the nearly cliff-like escarpment is seen trending away most strikingly to the north. We are now in the valley of the river Arrow. On the way to 156 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Exhall we come — not led by Caliban — to " where crabs grow," for the hedgerows here are remarkable for the number of crab-apple trees. Shakespeare must have had them in mind when he wrote The Tempest. Exhall lies in a beautiful country, on somewhat obscure byways that may have given the place that elusive character with strangers to which it owes its nickname of " Dodg- ing " : although, to be sure there are the other readings of " Dadging," whose meaning no one seems to compre- hend ; and "Drudging," which it is held is the true epithet, given in allusion to the heavy ploughlands of the vale. Yet another choice has been found, in " Dudging," supposed to mean " sulky " ; but the ingenuity of commentators in these things is endless. There is, at any rate, in coming from Ardens Grafton, no modern difficulty in finding Exhall. It is a little village of large farms, with a small aisleless Early English and Decorated church whose interest has been almost wholly destroyed by the so-called " restoration " of 1863. A window with the ball-flower moulding characteristic of the Decorated period remains in the south wall, and there are brasses to John Walsingham, 1566, and his wife ; but for the rest, the stranger within these gates need not regret the church being locked, in common mth most others in Shakespeare land. The hollow road at Exhall, with high, grassy banks and the group of charm- ing old half-timbered cottages illustrated here is a delight. The builder who built them — they are certainly at least a century older than Shakespeare — built more picturesquely than he knew, with those sturdy chimney- stacks and the long flight of stairs ascending from the road. There are orchards at Exhall where I think the " leather-coats " such as Davy put before Shallow's guests yet grow : they are a russet apple, and, like the 158 M6\m\i ,3WU3 3Q ^luOMgx xuajBC Jt?. >f «^ gt <^ !!fliltanf^ <::3 Sjcp<:? ma .cg> ^ue <:^ ofeit c3 BRASS TO THOMAS DE CRUWE AND WIFE, WIXFORD. SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND " bitter-sweeting," own a local name which Shakespeare, the Warwickshire countryman, knew well enough, but of whose existence Bacon could have known nothing. What says ]\Iercutio to Romeo ? " Thy wit is a very bitter sweeting : it is a most sharp sauce." And if you, tempted by the beautiful yellow of that apple, pick one and taste it, you will find the bitterness of it bite to the very bone. Exhall takes the first part of its name, " ex," from the Celtic word uisg, for water : a word which has given the river Exe its name, and masquerades elsewhere as Ouse, Exe, Usk, Esk, and so forth. But the river Arrow is a mile distant, and Wixford, which comes next, whose boundaries extend to that stream, is much better entitled to its name, which was originally "uisg-ford," meaning " water -ford." " Papist " Wixford is said to have derived its nick- name from the Throckmortons, staunch Roman Catholics, who once owned property here. The Arrow runs close by the scattered cottages of this tiny place, which might be styled merely a hamlet, except that it has a parish church of its own. A delightful little church it is, too, placed on a ridge and neighboured only by some timber- framed cottages. Luxuriant elms group nobly with it, and in the churchyard is a very large and handsome yew-tree, whose spreading branches, perhaps more symmetrical than those of any other yew of its size in this country, are supported at regidar intervals by timber struts, forming a curious and notable sight. There are monumental brasses in the little church ; by far the best of them, however, is the noble brass to Thomas de Cmwe and his wife Juliana, appropriately placed in the south chapel that was founded by him. Thomas de Cruwe — whose name was really " Crewe," only our ancestors were used to spell phonetically— was scarcely 160 SUMINIER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the warlike knight he would, from his plate-armour and mighty sword, appear to be. He was, in fact, chief steward to Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, and attorney to the Countess Margaret, widow of his prede- cessor. He was, further, a " Knight of the Shire," or member of Parliament, in 1404, and Justice of the Peace ; and having filled these various professional and official positions, let us hope with as much satisfaction to his employers and others as obviously to his own advantage, he died at last in his bed, as all good lawyers, even of his date, the beginning of the fifteenth century, ought to do, in the year 1418. The date of his death is, however, not mentioned on the brass, the blanks in the inscrip- tion, left for the purpose, having never been filled. His wife Juliana, who had been the widow of one of the Cloptons, predeceased him, in 1411, and Thomas de Cruwe caused this beautiful and costly brass to be engraved in his own lifetime. The incomplete inscrip- tion is by no means unusual, numerous brasses through- out the country displaying similar unfilled spaces; pointing to the indifference with which the date of departure of the dear departed was all too often re- garded by their more or less sorrowing heirs, executors, and assigns. This splendidly-engraved brass, which ranks among the largest and finest in England, is mounted on a raised slab measuring nine by four feet ; the effigies five feet in height. A curious error of the engraver of this monu- ment is to be noted, in the omission of Thomas de Cruwe's sword-belt or baldrick, by which the sword hanging from his waist has no visible means of support. The odd badge— apparently unique in heraldry — of a naked human left foot is seen many times repeated on the brass. No explanation of it seems ever to have been offered. We might have expected a cock in the 162 BEGGARLY BROOM act of crowing, for " Crewe," for our ancestors dearly loved puns upon family names and were never daunted by the vapidity or appalling stupidity of them ; but in this case they forbore. The penultimate village of these rhymes, " Beggarly " Broom, also stands upon the Arrow. Marston, as we have seen, dances no more, nor does Pebworth pipe ; the supernatural no longer vexes Hillborough, and Grafton is not so hungry as you might suppose. Exhall is not difficult to find, and there are not any Roman Catholics at Wixford ; while Bidford is not obviously drunken. But Broom is just as beggarly as ever. Broom was originally a hamlet of squatters on a gorsy, or broom-covered heath, and a hamlet it yet remains. Modern times have brought Broom a railway junction and a bridge across the Arrow, where was until recently only a ford ; but Broom is not to be moved into activity by these things, or anything. Anglers come by cheap tickets from Birmingham and fish in the Arrow, and swap lies at the " Hollybush " and " Broom " inns about what they have caught, but there still is that poverty-stricken air about the place which originally attracted the notice of the rhymester, centuries ago. A flour-mill, still actively at work by the river, and a new house being built, do little to qualify this ancient aspect of squalid decay, which seems to extend even to the inhabitants, who may be observed sitting stolidly and abstractedly, as though contemplating the immensities. They are probably only wondering whence to-morrow's dinner is coming, a branch of philosophical inquiry of poignant interest. M 2 163 CHAPTER XVI The '^ Swan's Nest' — Haunted? — Clifford Chambers — Wincot — Qiiinton^ and its club day. Twelve miles south of Stratford, across the level lands of the Feldon, you come to Chipping Campden, perched upon the outlying hills of the Cotswold country. The inevitable way southward out of Stratford town lies over the Clopton Bridge, and then, having crossed the Avon, the roads diverge. To the left you proceed for Charlecote and Kineton ; straight ahead for Banbury and London ; and to the right for Chipping Campden or for Shipston-on-Stour, The jDoint where these roads branch and go their several ways was until recently a very charming exit from or entrance to the town. Here stands the old inn, the " Swan's Nest," ex " Shoulder of Mutton," by the waterside, and opposite are the grounds of the old manor-house, enclosed behind lofty and massive brick walls. The " Swan's Nest " is a red-brick house of good design, built in 1677, when an excellent taste in archi- tecture prevailed. The sign was then the " Bear," a very usual name in these marches of the Warwick influence. It arose upon the site of a hermitage and Chapel of St. Mary IMagdalene that had long subsisted upon the alms of travellers this way, generations before Sir William Clopton built his bridge, and remained for some time afterwards, until the Reformation swept all such things away. The manor-house opposite is now to let, and long has 164. HAUNTED ? been. They say it is haunted — but " they " ? Who then are they ? No very rehable folk, be sure : only those irresponsible gossips who scent mysteries behind every board announcing " This Desirable Mansion to Let." The more desirable the mansion, the more inexplicable that it should not be desired of some one and become let. As the months go by and lengthen into years and the house-agents' boards begin them- selves to show some evidences of antiquity, the mystery -Ml CLOPTON BRIDGE, AND THE SWAN S NEST. deepens and the ghost is born. I think this especial ghost was born in the bar-parlour of the " Swan's Nest." But it is difficult to get any exact information about this spirit. It would be : it invariably is. Whether the midnight spook be some mournful White Lady who looks from the dust-grimed windows of yonder gazebo upon the road, or some horrific spectre who like the ghost of Hamlet's father " could a tale un- fold, whose lightest word Would harrow up thy soul " and make " Each particular hair to stand on end. Like quills upon the fretful porcupine," I cannot say. But the local gossip will not lesson as time goes on and the place remains unlet. There could 165 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND not, for one thing, be a much better setting for ghostly manifestations. It is true that the road is one much used by traffic, and by motorists in especial, whose dust and horrid odours might well disgust any but the hardiest of wraiths ; but here is the old garden-pavilion or gazebo on the wall at the fork of roads, with its quaint roof and the windows from which the people of the manor would look out upon the traffic when it was not so dusty and did not stink so much, and here are still the trunks of the magnificent elms that until recently cast a grateful shade upon the road and made the bridge -end so beautiful a scene. But the elms have been lopped and show cruelly amputated limbs, and no one looks any more from the gazebo : it is an eloquent picture of the Past. Beyond this spot we leave the Shipston road and turn to the right, coming in two miles to Clifford Chambers, which is not the block of offices or residential flats its name would seem to the Londoner to imply, but a picturesque village, taking the first part of its name from an olden ford on the Stour, and the second part from the manor having formerly been the property of the house-stewards, or " Chamberers," of the great Abbey of Gloucester. The village street of Clifford Chambers stands at an angle from the road, and so keeps its ancient character the better, for the way through it down to the Stour is only a rustic track. Clifford Chambers is therefore entirely unspoiled. Here is the church, grouping beautifully with the ancient parsonage, now a farm- house again, as it was during the time of the plague at Stratford, in the year when William Shakespeare was born, and when a mysterious John Shakespeare was living here. " Mysterious " because nothing more is known of him, and because the question arises in some minds, " Was the John Shakespeare then living at 166 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Clifford Chambers identical with the John Shakespeare of Stratford-on-Avon, father of William ? Was William Shakespeare, in fact, born here, instead of at ' the Birthplace ' in Henley Street, or did John Shakespeare remove his wife and infant son hither when the plague broke out in the summer of 15C4 ? " Any question of this being the birthplace would seem to be at once disposed of by the undoubted baptism of William Shakespeare at the parish church of Stratford-on-Avon ; but the summer retreat of the Shakespeares to this place may yet be a field for interesting speculation. There is not a more charming old black-and-white house in the neighbourhood than this, with its long range of perpendicular timbers, roughly-split in the old English fashion, which might well show some " restorers " how to do it ; and the odd outside stairway at the gable- end, roofed over with its little penthouse roof. It comes well enough in black and white, but forms a feast of mellow colour, in the rich but subdued tints that the lichens and the stains of time and weather have given. Facing up the rustic street, more like a village green than street, is another and a statelier house : the manor- house, enclosed within its garden-walls. It is of stone, in the early years of the eighteenth century, when Queen Anne reigned. ''Anna, wliom three realms obey. Who sometimes counsel takes, and sometimes tay. " The view through the gates, flanked vnih imposing masonry piers crested with what the country folk call " gentility balls," shows a delightful picture of old-world stateliness. Time within this enclosure seems to have stood still. You can imagine people living here who still take " a dish of tay," who are " vastly obleeged " when you ask them how they do, and " protest they 168 WINCOT are mighty well," or have " the vapours," as the case may be, instead of being, as they would be in other surroundings and in the vile phrases of to-day, " awfully fit," or " feeling rotten." You can imagine, I say, the owners of this fine old manor-house drinking their dish of tay out of fine old " chaney," as they used to call it; still speaking in the fashion that went out of date with the death of the great Duke of Wellington, who was among the last, I believe, to say " obleeged " and to call a chair a " cheer." Now only the inost rustic of rustics talk in this manner, and when they say " cowcumber," and " laylock," and speak of " going fust " they are thought vulgar and reproved by their children. But such was the pro- nunciation used by the best in the land in years gone by. There are the loveliest gardens in the rear of this old manor-house, with orchards of apples and pears and wall-fruit beyond, and an older wing by a century or so. The main road goes straight ahead for some miles, with Long Marston rather more than a mile on the right. It is fully described in these pages, in the first of the two chapters on the " Eight Villages." On the left is the old farm-house which is all that is left of the hamlet of Wincot, the place where " Marian Hacket, the fat ale wife," mentioned by Christopher Sly in the induction to the Taming of the Shreiv, had her alehouse, at which that drunken tinker had run up a score. Many of the hamlets round about are "cotts," "cotes," or "cots"; Grimscote, Foxcote, Hidcote, Idlicote, Darlingscott, and others. Wincot as a hamlet of Quinton finds mention in the registers of that church, and in them, November 21st, 1591, is still to be found the entry recording the baptism of Sara Hacket, daughter of Robert Hacket. The fat Marian, therefore, who allowed 169 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND drunken undesirables to run up scores, was probably a real person. As we make for Quinton the tree-crowned height of Meon Hill, an outpost of the Cotswolds, forms a striking landmark in this vale. It is, according to the Ordnance Survey, 637 feet high, and its position gives it an appear- ance of even greater eminence. At its foothills lies the village of Quinton, in a district very little disturbed by strangers, and in summer days one of quiet delights. Coming over to Quinton one afternoon, from a day of hospitable entertainment at King's Lodge, Long Marston, I cycled along the quiet sunlit road, past the old toll- house with its little strip of wayside garden, and silently came upon a black cat, appreciatively and with much evident enjoyment smelling the wall-flowers growing there. One never before credited cats with a liking for sweet scents. Only one event during the year disturbs the serenity of Quinton. At other times it drowses, like all its fellow villages of the vale ; but this one occasion is like that in Tennyson's May Queen, the " maddest, merriest day." It is the day when Quinton Club holds high revel. I do not know what is the purpose of Quinton Club, but the occasion of its merry-making is like that of a village fair, and all those travelling proprietors of steam round- abouts, cocoa-nut shies, shooting-galleries and popular entertainments of that kind who attend fairs make a point of visiting this celebration. And indeed I do not know what Quinton would do without them and the many stall-keepers who come in their train. To say merely that Quinton is not a large place would be to leave some sort of impression that, if not a little town, it was at least a considerable village. It is, as a matter of fact, a very small one, but to it on this day of days resort the people of those neighbouring places 170 QUINTON CLUB DAY unfortunate enough to have neither chib nor fair of their own, and you may see them trudging from all directions ; driving in on farm-wagons seated with kitchen-chairs for this purpose, or cycling. Towards evening, when most of the countryside has arrived, the strident tones of the steam organ that forms not the least important part of the roundabout, the thuds of the heavy mallets on the " try-your-strength " machines, the shouting of the cocoa-nut shy proprietors, and the general hum and buzz of the fair astonish the stranger afar off. Near at hand, the scent of fried fish is heavy on the air and ginger- bread is hot i' the mouth, and in the centre of the hurly- burly the steam roundabout blares and glares, presided over by a very highly-coloured full-length portrait of no less a person than Lord Roberts, in the full equipment of Field Marshal ; the surest test of a soldier's popularity. Lord Kitchener has never yet become the presiding hero over the galloping horses of the steam roundabout : he is perhaps something too grim for these occasions. I think, beneath the pictured face of Lord Roberts there lurks the countenance of he who was the popular favourite immediately before him ; Lord Wolseley, who for twenty years or more was in the shrewd opinion of the showmen, the most attractive personality to preside over the steam-trumpets, the odious " kist o' whustles," the mirrors and the circulating wooden horses. The showmen know best, they are in touch with popular sentiment ; and be sure that if you scraped off Lord Roberts, you would find the face of Lord Wolseley there. Indeed, the possibility of a real stratum of military heroes is only limited by the age of the machine itself ; and if it were only old enough one might penetrate beyond Lord Wolseley to Lord Raglan, and even back to that ancient hero of the inn signs, the Marquis of Granby. 171 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND The fine church of Qiiinton looks across the road to the village inn, the " College Arms." The arms are those of Magdalen College, Oxford, owner of the manor. The church is a Decorated building, with fine spire, and contains some interesting monuments ; chief among them an altar-tomb with a very fine brass to Joan Clopton, widow of Sir William Clopton, who died in 1419. An effigy, on another altar-tomb, seen in the church, is said by some to be that of her husband; others declare it to be that of one Thomas le Roos. She survived her husband several years, dying about 1430, in the habit of a religious recluse, or " vowess." She lived probably in a cell or anchoress's hold built on to the church and commanding a view of the altar, and must have had a singularly poor time of it in all those eleven years. No trace remains of her uncomfortable and singularly dull habitation. This misguided lady was by birth a Besford of Besford in Worcestershire, and her coat of arms, displayed separately and also impaled with that of her husband, has six golden pears on a red ground, by way of a painfully far- fetched pun on " Besford." Not even the most desolat- ing punster of our own time could or would torture " Besford " into " Pearsford," but our remote ancestors were capable of the greatest enormities in this way. Some of the red enamel still remains in the heraldic shields on this fine brass, which, including its canopy, is six feet four inches long. The figure of Joan Clopton, and the brass in general, is in excellent condition, perhaps because the descendants of the family took care of it. One of them, a certain " T. Lingen," whose name appears upon the tomb, repaired it in 1739. A Latin verse occupies the margin of the brass, with little figures of pears repeated at intervals. The verse has been translated as follows — 172 LOWER CLOPTON " Vowed to a holy life when ceased her knightly husband's breath, Joan Clopton here, Ainie's grandchild dear,' implores Thy grace in death ; O ! Christ, for Thee, O ! Jesu Idest, how largely hath she shed Her bounteous gifts on poor and sick — how hath she garnished Thy stately shrines with splendour meet — how hath she sent before Her earthly wealth to Thee above, to swell her heavenly store, For such blest fruits of faith, O grant, in Thine own house her home : Soft lies an earthly tomb on those to whom these heavenly blessings come." A scroll above her head is inscribed with the words — ''Complaceat tibi dne eripias me Due ad adiuuand' me respice " an appeal that may be rendered, " Be good and loving to me, O Lord." A striking instance of the affection inspired by Queen Elizabeth is to be noticed in the Royal arms of her period over the chancel arch, bearing, in addition to " that glorious ' Semper Eadem ' " alluded to by Macaulay in his ballad on the Armada, the inscription " God love our noble Queen." Resuming the way to Chipping Campden, the road passes the spot marked on the maps " Lower Clopton." This, or the other tiny hamlet away on the left, called " Upper Clopton," was the home of that first Shakespeare recorded in history, who was hanged in 1248 for robbery. Through Mickleton, a more considerable village than its neighbours, and deriving its original name of " Mycclan- tune," the " larger town," from that fact, up climbs the highway to Campden. It is in some ways difficult to imagine Campden the busy and prosperous place it once unquestionably was ; but the quiet old streets, lined with houses almost every one of good architectural character ; and the old market- house, and the fine church give full assurance of the commercial activity and the wealth that have departed. 173 CHAPTER XVII Chipping Campden. Campden's position as a market town dates back to Saxon times, when the verb " ceapan," to buy, gave the prefix " Cliipping " to it. The town rose to greater prosperity when the ancient wool-growing wealth of the Cotswolds was doubled by the manufacture in these same districts of the cloth from those wealth-bringing fleeces ; and great fortunes were amassed by both wool- merchants and clothiers. The rise of England from an agricultural and a wool-growing country, such as Australia now is, to a manufacturing community directly concerned such towns as Stroud, Northleach, Burford and Chipping Campden, which, with the intro- duction of weaving, earned two profits instead of one. There are perhaps a dozen little Cotswold towns whose great churches were rebuilt in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, in a magnificent style by the wealthy merchants of the time, whose monumental brasses still in many cases remain, representing them standing upon sheep, or woolsacks, or with the tailor's shears between their legs ; the origins of their wealth. When the cloth manufacture largely migrated to the Midlands and the north, such towns as Campden, Burford, and Northleach began to decay, and now that Australia is the chief source of the wool supply it is difficult to see how they are ever to recover. They are not on the great routes of traffic, and railways do not come near them. Campden is situated on a kind of shelf or narrow 174 OLD HDUSE.S, CUIPPIiNG CAMI'DEX. :^ THE MAKKET HOUSE, CHIl'l'INO CAMl'DEN. [ Tufdcc p. 174. CHIPPING CAMPDEN plateau upon the Cots wolds. You come steeply up to it, and, leaving it, rise as steeply as before. Like most of its neighbours on Cotswold, it is a stone-built town, grown grey with age and weathering. When some new mason-work is undertaken — which is not often — the stone is seen to be of a pale biscuit colour; but it soon loses that new tint and rapidly acquires the rather sad hue of the older work. The traveller fresh from Stratford, where brick, and timber-framed and plastered houses abound, feels astonishment in the sudden transition to a place like Campden, in which I believe there is not a single example of timber-framing. The old town of Campden is extraordinarily full of architectural interest ; with domestic work ranging from the mid -fourteenth century house of the Grevels to the beginning of the eighteenth century, when the town began to decline and building ceased. No modern suburbs are found on the outskirts of Campden. I do not know how the town manages to exist. There is a railway station, but it is a mile away and it is only incidental and placed on the line to Evesham and Worcester. No great genius was ever born at Campden, or if he was, he missed fire and perished unknown. Therefore it is not a place of pilgrimage, and only parties of architectural students, measuring up or sketching some of the charming bits with which it abounds ; or artists, or contemplative ruminative folk who want to escape from the eternal hustle of this age and its devilish gospel of " get on or get out " ever go there. " Past " is traced over its every building. " There was a time " might be inscribed over the open-sided and quaintly- colonnaded market-house ; and " Yesterday " should be the town motto. There are little courts off the main street where the leisured explorer in Campden will 175 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND find remains of the old wool warehouses, with here and there a traceried Gothic window. Many old sundials still exist on the walls ; in particular a charming example near the market-house with the initials W. S. T. and date 1690; and dated house-tablets show with what pride the old inhabitants looked upon their homes. But the pride of all the ancient houses of Campden is that house where William Grevel lived in the fourteenth century. It is not a very large house, one thinks, for so wealthy a man as he was, described as he is on the brass in the church as " the flower of the wool -merchants of all England," but it presents a charming frontage to the street and has an oriel window of peculiar beauty, presided over by two huge and hideous gargoyles, the one representing a winged, bat-like monster with gaping mouth and a ferocious expression ; the other a kind of demon dog with glaring eyes of intense malignity^ — the late Mr. William Grevel's familiar spirits, perhaps. Every one well-read in the history of his country knows that the ranks of its aristocracy and its peerage have constantly been reinforced from the trading classes. It is a matter of money. Wlien a man has great posses- sions he finds the House of Lords waiting to receive him. It has been so for centuries, and not only so, but the ennobled have in their own later generations given younger sons to trade. The different processes are still seen working; and why not ? Wealth will secure consideration, and younger sons who cannot always marry money must in their turn go into trade and make it. The old wool-merchants and clothiers often rose to the peerage on their own account, or married their sons and daughters into its ranks. William Grevel, who was a descendant of other mercantile Grevels, never became more than a wealthy trader. As such he died 176 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND in 1401, and it was not until just over two centuries had passed that his descendant, Fulke Greville, entered the Hsts of the coroneted as Baron Brooke ; the eighth Baron Brooke not becoming Earl of Warwick until 1759. The Grevels — or " Grevilles," as they afterwards spelt their name — therefore only belatedly won to that haven where they would be ; but most others were more fortunate. Baptist Hicks, for example, is an extra- ordinary instance of swift accumulation of wealth. He, however, made it in London, as a mercer and perhaps a good deal more as a moneylender. He lent money to James the First among others, and became so warm a man that he returned in 1609 to his native Gloucester- shire and purchased the manor of Campden, building a magnificent country seat next the church. The cost of this was £29,000 : over £200,000 according to present value. He had so much money and so fine a house that he, being already a Knight, was in 1628 created a Viscount. He died the following year, not like Tenny- son's Countess of Burleigh, because of the weight of an honour to which he had not been born, but by reason of age and possibly chagrin that he had not been created an Earl. He was a benefactor to Campden, and built the charm- ing group of almshouses that stand on the left-hand on the way to the church. Past these almshouses, the way goes directly to the church, a noble building of date somewhere about 1530. It owes its present stately proportions and Perpendicular style largely to the benefactions of Grevel and others. The tower is remarkable for a buttress which is in some ways a kind of highly-developed mullion running through the centre of the window of the lower stage. It is perhaps rather more curious than beautiful, and as it cannot be of any constructional value and adds little 178 THE SHIRT-STEALERS if anything to the stabihty of the tower, we can only regard it as one of those freaks of the last phase of Gothic architecture which tell us, if we have but the wit to understand, that. Reformation or no Reformation; with Henry the Eighth or without, the Gothic spirit was dying. The curious ogee-shaped roof of a building seen in the foreground of the accompanying view of the church is that of a garden-pavilion, or gazebo, of Campden House, the lordly mansion built in 1613 by Sir Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden, I have seen curious old illustrations of this fine house, by which it would seem to have been a place of extraordinary grandeur. It is said to have been the largest house ever built in England, and stood upon eight acres of ground. This truly extensive mansion existed no longer than thirty- two years, for it was burnt by order of Prince Rupert in 1645. During that time of civil war Campden House had been a notable rallying-place for the Royalists, who under a rough soldier. Sir Henry Bard, had made them- selves a pestilent nuisance, not only to their natural enemies, but even to sympathisers. If they needed anything in the way of food, forage, or apparel, they took it where it was to be found, whether from Round- head or Royalist. They raped the very clothes off the country people's backs. " A man," says one of these lamenting rustics, " need keep a tight hold of his very breeches, or 'tis odds but what these Sabines will have them, and if he is let keep his shirt, it is thought a matter of grace." So it was not altogether regretfully that they saw Bard and his brigands depart while there remained one of those indispensable articles, or a hat, or pair of shoes in the neighbourhood. When the garrison left, they fired the mansion. It was never rebuilt, and to this day its ruins stand to keep the tale in mind. N2 179 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND That the church was rebuilt in the very last years of the Late Perpendicular style is more and more evident as you approach and examine it. William Grevel in 1401 left a hundred marks towards the work, and you will be told locally that the present building is the result of that gift. But not very much could have been done with such a sum, and in any event, the fabric is distinctly and unmistakably over a hundred years later in date. The ogee pinnacles and mouldings, and especially the flattened arches of the nave-arcade tell their archi- tectural tale in a way that cannot be gainsaid. On the floor of the chancel is the fine brass to William Grevel, 1401, and Marion, his wife, 1386. It is, with its canopied work, eight feet nine inches high ; the figure of Grevel himself being five feet four inches. We see him habited in the merchant's dress of his period, and with the forked beard that was then the usual wear of the elderly among his class, as Chaucer says, in his Canterbury Tales: "A marchant was there with a forked beard." Other brasses are to William Welley, merchant, 1450, and wife Alice; John Lethenard, merchant, 1467, and his wife Joan; and William Gybbys, 1484, with his three wives, Alice, Margaret and Marion, and seven sons and six daughters. The stately monument of Baptist Hicks, first Viscount Campden, and his wife occupies the south chancel chapel. It is one of the works of Nicholas Stone and his sons, whose extraordinarily fine craftsmanship as sculptors and designers of monuments in the seventeenth century redeemed to a great extent the rather vulgar ostentation which marked in general the neo-classic style of the age. The monument takes up nearly all the floor space and rises to a great height. Beneath a canopy formed by it rest the recumbent marble effigies of that ennobled wool-merchant and sometime Lord Mayor of London, 180 VISCOUNT CAMPDEN and his wife, habited in the robes of their rank, and with coronets on their heads. They are impressive in a very high degree. A long Latin inscription narrates his good deeds and expatiates upon the good fortune of Campden which benefited by them. It is not easy to excuse the deplorable taste which produced the large monument against the wall to Edward Noel, 2nd Viscount Campden, who died 1642, and his widow, Juliana, 1680. We would like to believe that the idea of it was none of Nicholas Stone's, but was dictated by the mortuary grief of that thirty-eight years' long widow, who no doubt found great satisfaction and consolation in coming every now and then to open its doors and look at the gruesome white marble figures, larger than life, of herself and her husband, representing them standing hand in hand, in their shrouds. They remind one very vividly of the lines in Ruddigore — " And then the ghost and his lady toast To their churchyard beds take flight. With a kiss perhaps on her lantern chaps And a grisly, grim ' Good-night ! ' " The visitor to Campden church is told that the black marble doors disclosing these figures and now fixed permanently open, against the wall, were generally closed during the lifetime of the widow, and were opened at her decease. The long epitaphs tell us in detail about her, her husband, and her family. On the left-hand is that to the husband — " This monument is erected to preserve the memory and pourtrait of the Right Honourable Sr. Edward Noel, Viscount Campden, Baron Noel of Ridlington and Hicks of Ilmington. He was Knight Banneret in the warrs of Ireland, being young, and then created Baronet anno 1611. He was afterwards made Baron of Ridlington. The other titles came unto him by right of Dame Juliana, 181 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND his wife, who stands collaterall to him in this monument, a lady of extraordinary great endowments, both of vertue and fortune. This goodly lord died at Oxford at ye beginning of the late fatall civil warrs, whither he went to serve and assist his sovverain Prince Charles the First, and so was exalted to the Kingdom of Glory, 8° Martii 1642." The right hand door is inscribed with the lady's own description, and of her children's fortunes — " The Lady Juliana, eldest daughter and co-heire (of that mirror of his time) Sr. Baptist Hicks, Viscount Campden. She was married to that noble Lord who is here engraven by her, by whom she had Baptist, Lord Viscount Campden, now living (who is blessed with a numerous and gallant issue). Henry, her second son, died a prisoner for his loyalty to his Prince. Her eldest daughter, Elizabeth, was married to John Viscount Chaworth : Mary, her second daughter, to the very noble Knight, Sr Erasmus de la Fontaine. Penelope, her youngest daughter, died a mayd. " This excellent lady, for the pious and unparallel'd affections she retained to the memory of her deceased lord, caused this stately monument to be erected in her lifetime, in September Anno Dom. 1664." A very charming mural monument to the Lady Penelope shows a delicately-sculptured bust. She is seen wearing a dress with deep Vandyck lace collar. As with the other monuments, it is clearly from the hands of the Stone family. The Lady Penelope, who died young in 1633, is traditionally said to have died from the effects of pricking her finger when working in coloured silks. The position of the hand is said to be in allusion to the accident. A companion figure is that to the Lady Anne Noel, wife of the Lady Penelope's brother, Baptist. She died 1636. 182 THE 'CAMPDEN WONDER' The " Campden Wonder," at which people in 1662 marvelled, is still an unsolved mystery, and ever likely to remain so. The story of it began in 1660, on August 16th, when William Harrison, a staid elderly man of about sixty years, who had been trusted for many years as the steward of the widowed Juliana, Viscountess Campden, went to Charingworth, three miles away, to collect some rents. When night had come and he had not returned, his wife sent a servant, John Perry, in search. By morning, when he too had not come back, IMrs. Harrison grew more alarmed and sent her son, Edward, who met Perry returning, without having seen anything of his master. Young Harrison persuaded the man to go to Ebrington with him and to raise further inquiries. There they heard that William Harrison had called the evening before and rested, and that he had then left. He had then about £23 on him. On their way back to Campden, young Harrison and Perry met a woman who handed them a bloodstained comb and band which that morning she had found in the furze on the road between Ebrington and Charing- worth. They were those of the missing man, but of him no trace could be found. It did not take long to come to the conclusion that Perry must have had a hand in his master's disappearance, and he was arrested on suspicion of murder. He had told so many contradictory tales that he was rightly suspected, and after a week's im- prisonment he had yet another story. He now " con- fessed " that his mother, Joan Perry, and his brother Richard had long urged him to rob his master, and that at last they had on this occasion waylaid and robbed him, afterwards strangling him and throwing the body into the great mill-sink of the neighbouring Wallington's Mill. The comb and band had been put on the road by himself. John Perry's mother and brother were accordingly 183 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND arrested and the three were tried at Gloucester and convicted, notwithstanding the fact that no body had been found, and in spite of the piteous protestations of innocence by Joan Perry and Richard, and in face of the avowal by John that he must have been mad when he "confessed." He now declared he knew nothing of Harrison's death; but in spite of all these doubts, the three were executed, on Broadway Hill. Joan was hanged first, and Robert next, John calmly saw them die and listened to their last appeals to him to confess and to exonerate them. He was hanged last, protesting that he had never known anything of his master's death, or even if he were dead. But, he added, they might hereafter possibly hear. The countryside congratulated itself upon being rid of three undesirables. The old woman had always been reputed a witch. And when the affair was becoming a stale and exhausted topic, one autumn evening at dusk, two years later, Mr. William Harrison, for whose murder three persons had been convicted and hanged, returned and walked into his own house. He gave forth an ingenious but preposterous story to account for his two years' absence. As he was returning home, he said, on the evening of his disappearance, he was intercepted by three horsemen who attacked, wounded and robbed him, and carrying him to a neigh- bouring cottage on the heath, nursed him there until it was possible to carry him across country to Dover, where they put him aboard a vessel and sold him to the captain, who had several others in like case with himself on his ship. They voyaged from Deal and after about six weeks' sail they were seized by Turkish pirates and he and the others were put aboard the Turkish ship and sold as slaves in Turkey. His master lived near Smyrna. After serving him as a slave for nearly two years, the 184 BKASS TO WII.MAM GREVEL AND WIFE, CHITl'ING (AMI-HEN. [To face p. 1S4 THE 'CAMPDEN WONDER' elderly Turk died and the slave escaped to the coast, where he persuaded some Hamburg sailors to take him as a stowaway to Lisbon. There he met an Englishman who took compassion upon him and found him a passage to England. Landing at Dover, he made his way directly home. This cock-and-bull story was all that the country ever had in the way of satisfaction. Harrison went about his steward's business as before, trusted and respected, and died ten years later. In after years some suspicion seems to have fallen upon the son, but for what reason does not appear. That industrious Oxford diarist, Anthony Wood, who took a keen interest in the affair, as did all the country, says, " After Harrison's returne, John was taken down [from his gibbet] and Harrison's wife soon after (being a snotty covetous presbyterian) hung herself in her owne house. Why, the reader is to judge." In leaving Campden and its memories, I must not let it be supposed that in speaking of the town as decayed and belonging to the past I either intend to slight it or forget the Guild of Handicraft established here in 1892. Removed from London in that year, it has sought to bring back in these more and more commercial and factory times the craftsman's old traditions of artistic and individual work, no matter in what trade. In printing, bookbinding, enamel- work, jewellery and cabinet-making it has sought by precept and example to further the teachings of Ruskin and Morris, and has created a new feeling here and elsewhere which has effects in places little suspected. 185 CHAPTER XVIII A Deserted Railway — Villages of the Stour Valley — Ettington and Squire Shirley — Shipston-on-Stour — Brailes — Comptou Wyiiyates. There is not an uninteresting road among the eight that lead out of Stratford, and all are beautiful. But none has more beauty than that which runs southward to Shipston-on-Stour. This way, or by the route leading through Ettington and Sunrising Hill, you go to Comp- ton Wynyates, that wonderfully picturesque old mansion of the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, which has remained unaltered for centuries in its remoteness, and is still not easily accessible. The Shipston road then, for choice, to Compton Wynyates. It follows, more or less closely the valley of the Stour, and here and there touches the river ; while companionably, all the way run the grass-grown cuttings and embankments of that long-abandoned Stratford and Shipston Tramway whose red brick bridge is a feature of the Avon at Stratford town. The deserted earthworks and ivy-grown bridges of this forgotten undertaking, now this side of the road and then the other, excite the curiosity of the stranger, but he will rarely find anyone to tell him the meaning of them, and at the best only vaguely. Their story is one of unfulfilled hopes and money flung ruinously away ; for they are the only traces of the Central Junction Railway projected in 1820, to run through to Oxford and London. It was a horsed tramway, and was opened through Shipston to Moreton-in-the-Marsh in. 1826. A re- 186 THE 'OLD WORSE AND WORSE' munerative traffic in general agricultural produce and goods was expected, but the enterprise seems to have been weighted from the beginning with the heavy expenses of construction. Estimated by Telford at £35,000 for the Stratford-on-Avon to Moreton section, they soon reached £80,000. But the doom of the project was sounded by the introduction of the loco- motive engine, almost simultaneously with the opening. In 1845 it was leased to the Oxford, Worcester and Wolverhampton Railway, a scandalously inefficient line whose initials, " O. W. W." suggested to saturnine wags the appropriate name of " Old Worse and Worse." This ill-managed affair was eventually absorbed into the Great Western Railway, which now owns these relics. Little villages are thickly set along the course of the Stour, to the right of the road ; ancient settlements, each but a slightly larger or smaller collection of farm- houses, barns and thatched cottages, with a church in their midst. Here the Saxon farmers came and early cultivated the rich meadow-lands, leaving the poorer uplands long unenclosed and untilled ; and to every little community came the clergy and set up a church and tithed those farmers who earned their livelihood by the sweat of their brows. Such a village is Atherstone- upon-Stour, where a majestic red brick farmhouse, dating from the seventeenth century, neighbours a debased little church. There is little of interest in that church, and the loathly epitaph to William Thomas, a son of the rector, who died in 1710, aged nine, of small- pox, decently veils in the obscurity of eighteenth century pedagogic Latin the full particulars given of his disease. A rather larger village is Preston-upon-Stour, reached from the highway after passing the lovely elm avenues 187 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND of Alscot Park. Thatched cottages looking upon an upland green, with village church presiding over it, are the note of Preston. Tall stone gate-piers of the eighteenth century, with fine wrought-iron gates, give entrance to the churchyard. The interior of the church is, however, a very shocking example of the eighteenth- century way with Gothic buildings. Smaller than any of these places by the lovely little Stour is Whitchurch, just before the larger village of Alderminster. It lies off to the right, not often troubled by the stranger. The place-name is thought to derive from a supposed former dedication of the church to St. Candida, or Wita. " Alderminster " means probably " the alderman's town," the property in Saxon times of some wealthy landowner, and has no ecclesiastical associations or monastic history that would account for the " minster " in the place-name. The road grows extremely beautiful at the crossing of the Stour by Ettington Park and the approach to Newbold. Here, where a by-road to Grimscote goes off on the right, an ornate pillar standing on the grass serves the purpose of a milestone and bears the sculp- tured arms — the gold and black pales (heraldically paly of six, or and sable) — of a former owner of Ettington Park, generally spoken of in the neighbourhood as " wold Squire Shirley, what lived yur tharty yur agoo." It was in 1871 that he erected this elaborate stone which I think must be the only poetical milestone in England. It is not great poetry, and there is not much of it ; but it shows the immense possibilities of wayside entertain- ment, if all its fellows were made to burst into song — " 6 miles To Shakespeare's Town, wliose name Is known throughout the earth ; To Shipston 4, whose lesser fame Boasts no such poet's birth." 188 A POET-SQUIRE You will see here that my own notion, earlier in these chaste pages, of re-naming the town " Shakespeare-on- Avon " germinated, however unconsciously, in " wold Squire Shirley's " brain, over forty years since. But this is not all. Two Latin and English verses are added to the tale of it — " Crux mea lux^ After darkness light. From liglit hope flows. And peace in death. In Christ is sure repose. Spes 1871- Post obitum Sal us. In obitu Pax In hue Spes Post tenebras lux." The shields of arms include the nine roundels of the see of Worcester, and a further shield of the Shirley arms, with a canton ermine. This poetical squire was Mr. Evelyn Philip Shirley, kinsman of Earl Ferrers. He refronted his house at Ettington Park, and indulged himself fully in that elaborate mansion in the verse he loved so well and composed so ill. In the hall still remains the shield of arms he set up there, displaying these same alternate black and gold stripes which come down from the times of Sewallis, and beneath it another of his compositions — " These be the pales of black and gold The which Sewallis bore of old ; And this the coat which his true heirs The ancient house of Sliirley bears." Ettington Park is now without a tenant and is, I believe, to be sold. Thus passes the pride of this branch of the Shirleys. It is a lovely park and a stately house, with the ivied ruins of the ancient church adjoining, including the tombs and effigies of older Shirleys and others who would 189 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND make excellent ancestors for any enterprising purchaser. " I don't know whose ancestors they were," says the Major-General in the Pirates of Penzance, of the monuments in the ruined chapel on the estate he has bought, " but I know whose they are." The Squire, besides his activities in the way of bad rhymes, stumbling metres, and obvious moral senti- ments, was an antiquary, and keen to alter the spelling of the place-name " Eatington " to " Ettington," on the coming of the railway in 1873. He showed that it is " Etendone " in Domesday Book, and that Dugdale, the historian of Warwickshire, was the first to spell it Eatington in 1656. But Dugdale, who knew the name derived from the watery situation of the place, was right, and Domesday wrong, as it very often is in these matters, the Norman-French compilers of it not being at all well-equipped for rendering the, to them, alien names correctly. Passing pretty scenes at Newbold-on-Stour, the road bears away from the river and touches it again at the equally pretty village of Tredington. The spire of Honington is then seen on the left, and Shipston-on- Stour is entered. There is a railway station at Shipston, the terminus of a little branch line from Moreton-in- the-Marsh. Wlien the railway reached so far it ex- hausted all its energies and could do no more. It might be supposed, from the efforts to reach Shipston by rail, that it was an important place, whose traffic was well worth securing — perhaps even, from its name, a port ; but it is long since this old market -town was a place of any commercial value, and no ships ever sailed the little Stour. They were sheep, not ships, that gave Shipston its name, and it first appears in history, nine hundred and fifty years ago, as " Scepewasce " ; that is to say, the place where the sheep were washed in those Saxon 190 COMPTON WYNYATES times. It was written " Scepwaesctun " in 1006, and is " Scepwestun " in Domesday; i.e. the Sheepwash Town. To Brailes, over two miles from Shipston, the road rises, commanding views down upon the left over " the Feldon," as the district between this and Stratford-on- Avon is known; that clearing in the ancient Forest of Arden which is by no means so bare of timber as might be supposed, and itself indeed looks from this height very like a forest. At Brailes is the parish church, proudly styled the " Cathedral of the Feldon." It is large, its tower is lofty, rising to a hundred and twenty feet, and it stands in a prominent position. Its Perpen- dicular architecture is good, too, but there is nothing, internally, of a cathedral about it. At the " George " inn, Brailes, the traveller to Comp- ton Wynyates will do well to refresh himself before he proceeds further, for not only has he come far, but when he, has threaded the steep and winding lanes beyond which that romantic manor-house of the Comptons lies in its deep, cup-like hollow, he will need something wherewith to fortify his energies, especially as it is extremely likely he will lose himself on the way, and as there is no likelihood of his being able to refresh himself when there. Romance, lovely scenery, and picturesque architectural grouping are not well seen when fasting. " Wynyates " is a puzzling word, which may mean " Vineyards " or " Windgates " : the fii'st for choice. The place, let it be impressed upon the stranger, is a house, not a village ; although, looking sheerly down upon the hollow where its crowded gables and many clustered chimneys are seen, with its adjoining church, a village it might appear to be. There was once, indeed, such a place, but it disappeared so long ago that no one can tell us anything about it, and its church, which stood upon 191 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the site of the present building, was battered to pieces and " totally reduced to rubbish," as Dugdale tells us, during the siege of the mansion in 1644. Thus the Comptons, Marquises of Northampton, have the place all to themselves. And it is very likely that the explorer also will have Compton Wynyates to himself, for this is but one of the residences of that noble family, whose chief seat is at Castle Ashby, away in Northamptonshire, and it is occupied for only a short interval in every year. By an admirable generosity and courtesy the stranger may generally be assured of permission to see the interior of the mansion, a privilege very well worth exercising. Sir William Compton, the builder of Compton Wyn- yates, was the descendant of a long line of obscure squires who had been settled here for centuries. He owed his advancement in life to being brought up with Henry the Eighth, who cherished an affection for him and gave his friend the Castle of Fulbrook, which was situated between Stratford-on-Avon and Warwick. Sir William Compton did a singular thing with the gift. He pulled it down and transported the materials by pack- horse or mule-train the dozen miles or so across country to this secluded hollow, and with them built the charming house we now see. Fulbrook Castle, it would thus appear, was less of a castle than a slightly embattled manor- house, built of red brick, with tall moulded chimney stacks, in the reign of Henry the Sixth. It had been in existence only some eighty years. Its chimneys, according to tradition, were taken whole, the mortar being so strong that the bricks could not be separated. Thus the singularity of a brick house in a stone district is explained. It is red brick such as |hat of Hampton Court : a lovely mellow red, further toned by more than four 192 .i^M,^«Jb COM 1» TON WYN VATl :S luindrcd and lifty years. Tlic remains of a nu)at, and sonic beanlil'id oardt>ns, lorni an cx(|nisitc seltino-. Little has ever been done to alter the mansion. It is l)uilt aronnd a quadrani^le. anil is entered hy the orioinal brick porch with the Koyal arms of the Tndor periotl above. Within is the Circat Hall, panelled in oak, with tinil)ered roof and minstrel-oallery. The adjoininj]; dining-room, oak-})anclled and with richly-decorated plaster ceilino-. displaymg the heraldic devices of the C'omptons, is next the domestic chaj)el. On the Iloor above arc the withdrawing-rooms ct)nnnunicating with the chapel-oallcry. Here is " Henry the Kighth's Bedchamber," afterwards used by Queen Kli/.abeth when she visited Henry C'ompton. grandson of Sir William, in 1572, shortly alter creating liim Baron Compton. His son William is the hero of that Compton romance which brought the family great wealth. He fell inlove with the daughterand heiressof the enormously rich Sir John Spencer, alderman of London, but the father did not approve of it and refused to allow his daughter to hold any converse w'ith her lover, who then had rccoiu'sc to an ingenious strategem. He enlisted the Spencer's family baker upon his side, bri[)ing him to be allowed to carry the domestic bread to the house, and duly disguised appeared one morning with his load. He was so early that the alderman gave him sixpence and a homily on the virtues of diligence and punctuality. But when the loaves had been delivered, the lady herself took her place in the basket and was carried away in it and promptly married. Her father, cheated of the better match he had looked for, disinherited her, and the Spencer AveaUh would have gone other ways but for Queen Elizabeth, who when the first child of these enterprising lovers was born asked Sir John Spencer to be sponsor with her at the baptism of a child she was o 193 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND interested in, and to adopt it. He unsuspectingly agreed and thus became godfather and guardian of his grandson, who inherited the riches so nearly lost. The resourceful lover and husband, father of this fortunate boy, Spencer Compton, was created Earl of Northampton by James the First. Spencer, the second Earl, fought for King Charles at Edge Hill, October 23rd, 1642, and was slain at Hopton Heath the following March. In June 1644, the Royalist garrison of Compton Wynyates was be- sieged, and the house was captured in two days, and held throughout the war by the Roundheads, in spite of the bold moonlight attack in December, when the two brothers. Sir Charles and Sir William Compton, at the head of a daring party from Banbury, surprised the outposts, rushed the drawbridge which then crossed the moat, and fought a long hand to hand fight in the stables, before they were driven back. The long wooden gallery under the roof on one side of the house is known as " the Barracks." Here the garrison lay during those times. A panelled room in the tower is known as the " Council Chamber." Above it is the " Priest's Room," apparently at some time used as a secret chapel, for on the wooden window-shelf may be seen the five rudely-cut crosses for an altar. The church destroyed in the troubles of the civil war was rebuilt in 1663 by the third Earl of Northampton, and contains the battered monuments of Sir William Comp- ton, builder of the mansion, and his wife ; and of Henry, first Baron Compton ; retrieved from the moat, into which, after being broken up, they had been thrown. 194 CHAPTER XIX Luddington — A\^elford — ^V^eston-on-Avon — Cleeve Priors — Salford Priors. The way from Stratford to Evesham is a main road, the road through Bidford, that ah'eady described in the chapters on the " Eight Villages," and hardly to be mentioned again except that by making some variations here and there, two or three villages not otherwise to be visited may be included. The first is Luddington, two and a half miles from the town, on a duly sign- posted road to the left, an excellent road, although not marked so on the maps. Luddington, besides being a village of one long row of old thatched cottages close to the Avon, is of some mild interest as being the place of which Thomas Hunt, one of Shakespeare's school- masters, became curate-in-charge, and where, some say, Shakespeare was married. But the old church was burnt down many years ago and rebuilt in 1872, and the register, supposed to have been destroyed at the same time, was long kept in private hands, finally disappearing altogether. The late Mr. C. E. Flower, of Stratford-on- Avon, stated that, in his younger days, " no one dreamed of disputing the assertion that Shakespeare was married at Luddington old church " ; and many others declared that they had seen the entry in the book. The way through Luddington crosses over the railway and rejoins the main road half a mile short of Binton station. Welford lies away to the left. Welford is a kind of show place in the Stratford o 2 195 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND district. " Ah ! if you want to see a pretty place, you should go to Welford." The experienced traveller and amateur of rural beauty hears this with a certain amount of misgiving, for the popular suffrages might mean tea- gardens and all the materials towards making a happy day for those very many people who think nature unadorned to be a dull affair at the best. But Welford is quite as good as it is represented to be. One might almost style it the most picturesque village in the neigh- bourhood. There is a good deal of Welford in the aggregate, but it is so scattered that it has the appearance of half a dozen hamlets. It is best reached by turning off the road to Bidford just short of Binton railway station. A few yards bring you to what are called " Binton bridges," across the Avon, here running in overgrown channels, thick with "the vagabond flag," and shaded by willows that recall the lines in Hamlet — '' There is a willow grows askant the brook That sliews his hoar leaves in the glassy stream." You may notice, when the wind ruffles the leaves of the willow, that the description is exact; the underside of a willow-leaf being different from the upper, and of a hoary, grey-white tint. " Binton bridges " are not, as might perhaps be assumed, bridges side by side, but are continuations, across the two channels of the river. Immediately across them the sign of the " Four Alls " inn attracts notice. It is a picture-sign showing the King, " I rule all " ; a bishop, " I pray for all " ; a guardsman, " I fight for all " ; and a mournful-looking person, seated^ wearing a suit of black clothes and a thoughtful ex- pression of countenance : " I pay for all." It is a sign to be matched in other parts of the country, and was 196 WELFORD invented long ago by some sardonic person who had pondered deeply upon the functions of the IMonarchy, the Church, the Army, and the tax-payer. But he lacked the savage, saturnine humour of the person who thought of the "Five Alls," another sign not unknown in the length and breadth of the land. The Fifth All being the Devil : " I take all ! " The first part of Welford soon appears, on the right. It might be styled the chief part, because here, among the scattered groups of cottages, the church is found. The church itself is only mildly interesting, but the old lych-gate is a quaint survival, as weather-worn and rustic and untouched as Welford itself; its rude timbers seamed and bleached with the weather of over four centuries. Past the church you come down Boat Lane to the river, where the weir can be heard roaring. There are some particularly sketchable cottages in this lane, as Avill be seen by the illustration over-leaf. Returning, and proceeding southwards, other ancient thatched cottages are passed, and then we come to the maypole, doubtless regarded as the centre of the village. It is still dressed on May Day every year, and stands here all the year on its mound, a thing for the stranger to wonder at, gaily painted in bands of red, white and blue. It is not, of course, the only existing maypole in England. I myself, moi que vous parle, know about a dozen ; but they are sufficiently unusual to attract attention. The rest of Welford straggles along a broad street to the left, and presently ends obscurely in meadows leading to the river. Across field-paths one comes in this direction to the very out-of-the-world little village of Weston-on-Avon. The explorer who finds Weston feels like some member of the Geographical Society who has wandered in strange, outlandish parts and comes 197 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND back to read a paper on the subject ; but I dare say it is similarly discovered very frequently. Meanwhile, I have no travellers' tales to tell of the manners and customs of the people, who are, as commonly elsewhere, of two sexes and walk upright on their hind legs, and some are old and some young, and others yet middle- aged. And there is the railway station of Milcote, only BOAT LANE, WELFORD. a mile away, situated in a field. No one seems ever to go to it, or come from it ; " Milcote " being a species of dream place represented only by two remote houses. I believe the station must have been set down there by some railway manager suffering from strong delusions. Weston-on-Avon is really a very charming little place, with a small aisleless Late Perpendicular church, re- markable for the continuous range of windows high up in the north wall, giving the interior an unusual brightness and grace. The tower is furnished at its angles with gargoyles of an unusual size and imaginative quality. 198 SALFORD HALL Returning to Welford, a by-road leads by the meadows called " Welford Pastures " to Barton, and across the Roman road, the Ryknield Street, to the hamlet of Marlcliff, below Bidford, where the Avon becomes broader and navigable and lined with beauti- fully wooded cliffs, densely covered with foliage to the water's edge. A mile further is the village of Cleeve Priors, where the picturesque old " King's Arms " inn, with its horseman's upping-block in front, dates from 1691. Here, too, is a small seventeenth -century manor- house, with heavily-barred and grated door, breathing old-time distrust and suspicion. Returning through the village to the waterside, the river may be crossed here, by the long plank footbridge, only one plank wide, at Cleeve Mill and lock ; and Abbot's Salford reached, on the Evesham main road, just missing Salford Priors, where, if we wish to see it, there is a fine old church. Salford Priors was anciently the property of the Priory of Kenilworth, and Salford Abbots that of Evesham Abbey. Here, enclosed within a jealous high wall, is the old Hall, generally called " the Nunnery," because of a Roman Catholic sisterhood having been established here in modern times. It is a small Jacobean mansion, very tall in proportion to its size, and curiously huddled together. Quaint ciu'ved and re -curved gables of a bygone fashion, deeply set windows, and lofty stone chimney-stacks, give the place a reticent look; the look of a house with a history and secrets of its own. There are so many amateurs of the quaint and historic nowa- days that the occupiers of Salford Hall have grown a little tired of showing strangers the genuine old hiding- hole in the garret; behind a quite innocent-looking cupboard. You open the cupboard and see a common- place row of shelves. No one would suspect a secret there. But when a wooden peg is removed, the shelves, 199 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND together with the back of the cupboard, push back on hinges, admitting to a hiding-hole for priest or cavaher, or any M^hose necessities led him to store himself un- comfortably away here. Once inside, the fugitive could fix the door Avith a peg, so that it could not be moved from without. Harvington, which comes next on our way to Evesham, is a delightful cluster of old timbered houses, with a church whose Norman tower has been given a modern spire. The village is at least half a mile from the river, but it takes its name, originally " Herefordtun," from an ancient paved ford still there, a most charming and interesting scene. The ford is practically a submerged paved road, such as those by which the Romans crossed rivers, and is broad enough for wagons to pass. The roads on either side are, however, only byways, leading to the Littleton villages and the Lenches. Norton, whose full name is Abbot's Norton, comes next. It was for some years, until the beginning of 1912, the property of the Orleans family, one of the exiled Royal houses of France ; but the Due d'Orleans has now sold his estates and his residence at Wood Norton, close by, to Mr. Justice Swinfen Eady. Norton has yet more, and very fine timbered houses, and in its church lie a number of the Bigg family, in efRgy on altar-tombs emblazoned to wonderment with their heraldic honours and those of their wives. The marble lectern is a relic from Evesham Abbey. From Norton the road enters Evesham along Green- hill, where the battle was fought in 1265, and where the suburbs now chiefly extend. 200 CHAPTER XX Evesliam. The legendary story of Evesham's origin takes us back to the year 701, when one of the Bishop of Worcester's swineherds, seeking a strayed sow, penetrated the forest that then covered this site, and here found his sow and also a ruined chapel, relic of an ancient and forgotten church. A modern discoverer of ruins would find shattered walls and nothing else, but Eof, the swine- herd, beheld a vision of the Virgin and attendant saints singing there. Instead of worshipping, he ran, almost scared out his life, and only ventured back under the protection of Bishop Ecgwin himself, who saw the same wonderful sight and heard the singing. There could be but one outcome of this : the founding of a religious house upon the spot ; and thus arose the great Bene- dictine monastery of Eof's-hanune. Even in those times there would seem to have been people who could not digest this story, as the Bishop soon found, and he seems to have been so stricken by the tales told of him that he considered nothing less than a pilgrimage to Rome would avail him much. His preparations for departing were peculiar. He chained his legs together and having locked the chain, threw the key into the river. Arrived at Rome in spite of this amazing difficulty (we are not told how he got there !), a salmon bought for him proved to contain, when cut open, the key to unlock his fetters. The salmon had swallowed it in the Avon and had swum across seas ! This cumulative outrage upon 201 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND common sense then proceeds to tell us how the bells of Rome rang of themselves, and how impressed was the Pope. Nothing afterwards ever astonished him : his capacity for wonder was filled to the brim. These unparalleled occurrences seemed to this credulous and doddering old pontiff so strong a proof of Ecgwin's honesty that he forthwith conferred upon his monas- tery not only many valuable privileges, but freed it from the authority of Worcester. And Ecgwin, third Bishop of Worcester, resigned the greater post for the lesser, and became first Abbot of Evesham. There appears to have been an early doubt as to what the name was to be, for it is once referred to as " Ecguines- hamme " ; but the legendary herdsman Eof easily won the honour, and although Ecgwin was created a saint after his death, the place never acquired his name and thus we have " Evesham " instead of " Exham," as the place would probably otherwise have been called. On this foundation of incredible story the future wealth and power of the great Abbey of Evesham was laid. Its Abbots never grew ashamed of the stupid lies, and to the last sealed their deeds and documents with seals bearing representations of Ecgwin's unlocked fetters and other incidents of his fantastic invention. In spite of fire, invasion and even early confiscation of some of its property, Evesham Abbey grew wealthier and more influential. Its Abbots were of those great mitred Abbots who sat in Parliament, prone to anger and violence on occasion ; and not infrequently they were of the type of Abbot Roger, who in the thirteenth century expended the substance of the monastery on riotous living and kept his seventy monks and sixty servants so ill-clothed and fed that they went in rags and even starved. No bite nor sup for them ; and when they crawled into the Abbey, the leaky roof poured water 202 EVESHAM on them. Some died of starvation. It would take long to tell in full the story of the many years in which this strange Abbot ruled. But the monastery and its great Abbey church easily survived this miserable time, and fresh architectural glories were added. Even at the last, when the sup- pression of the great religious houses under Henry the Eighth was impending, more building was in progress. Abbot Lichfield, the last of the long line, then ruled, and was building the Bell Tower, which almost alone remains of the Abbey church. That church, 350 feet in length, and its many chapels and chantries, filled with the tombs of generations of benefactors who had hoped by their gifts to be prayed for " for ever," was destroyed in almost the completest manner. Even Thomas Cromwell, the most zealous of Henry the Eighth's coad- jutors, was impressed with the beauty of this great mass of buildings ; but all efforts to avert the destruction, and to put them to some collegiate use, failed. Not even the great Abbey of Bury St. Edmunds disappeared quite so completely as this of Evesham. Leland, wi'iting in 1540, six years later, remarked, with astonishment : " Gone, a mere heap of ruins." The position of the town upon the meadow-lands by the Avon is enshrined in the second half of the place- name, which in this case is not the more common " ham," indicating a " home," or settlement, but " hamme," a waterside meadow. You do not see the justness of this until the river has been crossed by the fine modern bridge, and the town viewed from Bengeworth, on the other side of Avon. Thence those meadows are seen, with the Abbey Bell Tower, and the towers and spires of the churches of St. Lawrence and All Saints, making an unusual grouping, with a certain grandeur in their contrasting dispositions. We may readily admit that 203 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the famous Bell Tower is the finest architectural work in Evesham, because the admission will make it the easier to criticise its great defect, its comparative dwarf ness. Built in 1533 by Abbot Lichfield, it was the last work of the Gothic era at Evesham, and is perhaps one of the most striking examples of the Perpendicular &^ =*!^ BELL TOWER, EVESHAM. period : embodying the features of the style in the highest degree, in the long lateral panellings wholly covering its surface. It is the more noticeable because of its solitary position. But to lavish upon it the un- qualified praise that is commonly given is alike uncritical of its own defect of insufficient height, and shows an ignorance or forgetfulness of the grander proportions of the central tower of Gloucester Cathedral, very closely resembling it in style, or of the unmatched 204 EVESHAM towers of the Somersetshire churches, many of which are not only loftier, and with far better and varied details, but have also that sense of height which is rather painfully lacking here. The entrance from the Market Place to what were once the Abbey precincts, where the churches of St. Lawrence and All Saints stand closely neighbouring one another, in one churchyard, is by the so-called Norman Gateway. There is not much left of the Norman work, the upper part being a half-timber building, apparently of the fifteenth century. The view into this corner from the Market Place is very picturesque, but it was better before the adjoining public library was built, a few years ago. Not only were some charmingly old-world houses destroyed to make way for it, but it is itself a building lamentably out of character with its surroundings. The church of St. Lawrence, very late in style and remarkable for the originality of its tower and spire, has some delicate and elaborate work; and in that of All Saints is the richly-panelled and fan-vaulted chantry built by Clement Lichfield, the last Abbot of Evesham, who lies here. A relic of the Abbey of a more domestic character is seen in the lovely little building on Abbey Green called the Almonry. It was formerly the place where the almoners distributed their doles, and is of all periods from Early English to Perpendicular, its materials ranging from stone to timber, brick and plaster. Many generations have had something to say in the building of it, and the present has at the moment of writing these lines said yet another word, stripping off the plaster with which the front had been covered for some two centuries. The sturdy oak timbering is now uncovered, and is a revelation to many of unsuspected beauty. An ancient stone lantern is inside the building, which 205 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND is now occupied as the " Rudge Estate Office." Perhaps, now that these new and better ways with old buildings are revealing long -forgotten craftsmanship, attention will be turned to the ancient Booth Hall, or market- house, still standing in the Market Place, covered in like manner with plaster. It would not be well to leave Evesham without re- ferring to the greatest event in its history, the fierce THE ALMONRY, EVESHAM. battle fought here August 4th, 1265, at Greenhill, on the road to Worcester. Simon de Montfort, Earl of Leicester, in arms against Henry the Third, and with the King himself a prisoner in his hands, lay at Evesham the night before with his army. De Montfort and his men were at mass early the next morning and then marched out to meet an enemy who outnumbered them and had cut off every avenue of escape. They were fighting for the popular cause, and De Montfort, French- man though he might be, was the chosen champion of English liberties. Privilege and the reactionaries had 206 THE BATTLE OF EVESHAM their way that day, for Prince Edward and his numeric- ally superior and encircling army cut down De IMontfort and his men in swathes. None asked or gave quarter on that fatal day. A large number hewed their way through and fled to the Castle of Kenilworth, but the old Simon and his son Henry were slain. The King himself was almost slain by mistake. The sculptured base of an obelisk on the site of the battle at Abbey Manor, Greenhill, portrays this incident, with the King's words, " I am Henry of Winchester, your King. Do not kill me." " It is God's grace ! " exclaimed the dying De Mont- fort. The exultant enemy did not scruple to mutilate his body and to send portions of it about the country. " Such," says Robert of Gloucester, "^vvas the murder of Ev^esham, for battle none it was^ And therewith Jesus Christ ill pleased was. As he showed by tokens grisly and good." In spite of the Ban of Kenilworth, which forbade the people to regard Simon de Montfort as a saint, and for- bade them to pay reverence to his memory, the resting- place of what remains of him could be collected was before the High Altar of the Abbey Church, and there thousands prayed and miracles were performed. For generations his shrine was the best asset of the church and contributed largely to its rebuilding. The next important warlike incident at Evesham was also the last ; the assault and capture of the town in May 1645 by Massey, the Parliamentary Governor of Gloucester, in spite of a gallant defence by Colonel Legge and his small garrison of 700 men. It was a three-to-one business, for Massey had 2000 men at his disposal. Since then the town has had peace to follow that fruit -farming and market -gardening career which it has pursued with ever-increasing success for two 207 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND centuries. There are not many tree- and bush-fruits uncultivated in the Vale of Evesham, whose deep rich soil yields abundantly to the growers' efforts, but the plum is the speciality of this Vale. It is not like the fabled Ai'thurian Vale of Avalon, " where comes not hail nor frost " ; for indeed the belated frosts of spring are the bugbear of the Evesham fruit-farmer, and he has been driven in self-defence of late years, to com- bat those nipping temperatures by burning nightly " smudges " of heavy oil, to take the sting out of the airs that would otherwise congeal his fruit-buds at the time of their setting, and thus ruin his prospect of a crop. The plum — and especially the yellow " egg plum " — is the Evesham speciality, and in April its blossom fills the Vale like snow. But there are com- paratively few strangers who see that wonderful spectacle. If the close of April be kind, you may see it and rejoice, but if the month be going out in rain and wind, then it is better to be at home than on Cotswold or in this sink of alluvial earth below those hills. I was caught in April showers at Evesham, on a day that was " arl a- collied like," as they say in these parts, meaning gloomy and overcast; and then "the dag came arn, an' then et mizzled, an' grew worser 'n worser, until et poured suthin tar'ble." And there I stood long in one entry off the High Street until I was tired of it, and then in another, and thus having done Evesham by double entry, ended the unprofitable day by staying the night, while the wind raged, and it hailed and rained and snowed by turns and simultaneously. But the next morning was a glorious one, although the roads were full of puddles and strewn with plum-blossom ravaged from the orchards by those nocturnal blasts. One need not be long at Evesham to note the extra- ordinary number of fruit-growers and market -gardeners 208 ABBEY GATEWAY, EVESHAM. SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND hereabouts, as shown by the many wagons, or floats, on their way to or from the railway station with baskets and hampers of apples, pears, plums, gooseberries, currents, tomatoes, or asparagus ; while to travel south of the toAvn, through the favoured Vale, by any road you please, is to see that these are highly specialised cultivations that give as distinct a character to this landscape as do the hop-gardens or the cherry-orchards of Kent. Leaving Evesham, it will be noticed how very much after the style at Stratford the Avon has been artificially widened and made to wear an almost lakelike effect, with a kind of everyday gala appearance. Here are trim grassy edges and public gardens; and boats and punts to be had for the hiring : a tamed and curbed Avon, like the Round Pond or the Serpentine in Kensington Gardens. 210 CHAPTER XXI Broadway — Winclicombe — Shakespearean Associations — Bishop's Cleeve. " An Eden of fertility," says an old writer, dwelling with satisfaction upon the Vale of Evesham. The neat orchards of to-day, with their long perspectives, and with bush-fruit planted in between the lines of plum and apple-trees, to economise every inch of this wonder- ful soil, would seem to him even more of an Eden, neater and more extended than in his day. It is not, you will say, the most picturesque form of cultivation, but it has that best of picturesque beauty to some minds, the picturesqueness of profit. I never yet knew a farmer who could see a cornfield with an artist's eye, and was the better pleased the more the poppies, corn-cockles, and herb-daisies grew in it. For generations past, you will be told, the fruit-growing of the Vale of Evesham has been steadily giving less profit, and scarce a man among the growers but will declare the times are ruining the trade. But the pastures continue to be planted as extensions of the orchards, and the railway traffic in fruit is an increasing branch of business. The only possible inferences, therefore, are that these jolly-looking market -gardeners, who live so well and look so pros- perous, thrive on ruination and really cultivate the plum for the aesthetic but fleeting pleasure of seeing every spring that wondrous vale of snow-white blossom that spreads out below Cots wold. Five miles or so south-eastwards across the vale brings P 2 211 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND you into Broadway, a village exploited some thirty years ago, and now, converted from the rustic place it was, into a residential district. The old houses and cottages remain, but the simple rustic folk who lived in them are dispersed, and in their old homes live that new class of appreciative and cultivated people with anything at command, from great wealth down to a sufficient independence. A generation ago people of this class would have thought life out of London or such great centres unendurable. They would have missed their town life and the shopping and all the thousand-and- one distractions, and if you had suggested Broadway or any such place, they would indignantly have asked if you wanted them to " bury themselves alive." And now ideals have changed, or perhaps more exactly, a new class of persons has been born. The wealthy who cannot live away from the centres of life still numer- ously exist, but there are great numbers of the leisured who have culture and resources Avithin themselves and are not dependent for their amusement upon extraneous things. Also we have in these days of swift travel by road and rail to reckon not only with the " week-ender " (who does not trouble Broadway nuich), but upon that class who will have it both ways, will take the best of town, and when the country is most desirable will leave town to others and retire to such places as this. These things have made Broadway a very different place from what it was a generation ago. The old people, sons of the soil, have been disinherited, and strangers — not only the " foreigners," of whom the rustics speak, meaning merely peojjle not of the same shire, but foreigners from over-seas — are living in their homes, and they still resent it, even though they may earn more in wages and in " tips" from the tipping classes. The sense of place and of justice too, is strong in the 212 BROADWAY blood of the countryman, and he feels it to be a shame that strangers should come from remote countries and covet the house where he and his fathers lived, and turn him out. It is an outcome of the recent appreciation of country life which is creating bitterness and resent- ment, not at Broadway alone, but all over the country.^ The broad street, with its grey stone houses, is to outward seeming very much the same, but there is a neatness, an unmistakable sense of money about the place. Every little plot of grass in front of the houses at the upper end, that never used to know the attentions of the mower, has become a lawn ; small cottages have been enlarged and thrown into one another, and farmhouses, whose ancient features have been ingeniously adapted by resourceful architects, have become resi- dences of the most delightful type. A little golfing, some motoring, half a dozen other interests and the modern craze for collecting, fill the lives of the people who live here. A retired actress collects pewter, and others scan the neighbourhood with the amiable object of snapping up rare and valuable pieces of china or furniture at much less than their worth from country- folk who are ignorant of their value. There is a curiosity shop in the village, too, where the stranger may find bargains, or may not ; and I am told — although I have never seen him — that an innocent-looking old person carrying a rare specimen of a grandfather's clock under his arm may generally be seen crossing the road by the " Lygon Arms," at times when obviously wealthy, and 1 As these pages go to press a singularly full coimrmatioii of these remarks appears in one of the Septeml)er 1912 issues of the Birmingham Post : " Evesham District Council have decided to build sixty cottages at Broadway under the Housing of the Working Classes Act, and the Local Government Board have sanctioned the borrowing of £10,000." Thus, a number of brand-new dwellings are to be built, to rehouse those villagers whose ancient homes have been taken from them. It is a curious sidelight upon the spread of culture. 213 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND possibly American and appreciative, occupants of motor- cars drive up. The suggestion is that very often this ingenious person sells his rare, and possibly " unique," clock at a stunning price and will be seen in another day or two with the fellow of it. This has been indignantly denied by the outraged people of Broadway, but re- affirmed in print, and I will leave it at that. My amiable friend, Mr. S. B. Russell of the " Lygon Arms," is of those who deny this quaint tale. The " Lygon Arms " itself has become a stately house, both without and within. As the " White Hart," of olden days it dates back to 1540. Traditionally Cromwell lay here, the night before the Battle of Worcester, and there are even traditions of Charles the First staying here, ten years earlier. I am not concerned to deny or to affirm these legends. In any case, it would be sheer futility to do so, for no evidence survives. But it is likely enough, for the " White Hart," as it then was, ranked with the best — as it does now, if I may say it. We may readily judge of its then standing, by the fine Jacobean stone entrance doorway, built by John Trevis in 1620, and still admitting to the house. It bears his name and that of Ursula his wife, with the date, and seems to mark a general restoration of the already old hostelry undertaken at that time. John Trevis — or "Treavis" — himself lies in Broadway old church, an inter- esting old building a mile or more distant from the village, and situated along a lonely wooded road, adjoining an ancient manor-house lately restored with much taste and discrimination. Trevis died in 1641, and has a brass to his memory. This old church is in a solitary situa- tion, and is largely superseded by a modern building near the village. There is a palimpsest brass in the chancel, and hard by is an enriched wooden pulpit, bearing this distinctly apposite and characteristically 214 THE COTSWOLDS Reformation-period inscription : " Prov. 19. Wher the word of God is not preached, the people perish." But to return to Broadway and the " Lygon Arms." Thirty years ago the house had fallen into a very poor condition, and the great stone building with its fine rooms and its air of being really a private mansion, had declined to the likeness of a village alehouse. It was all the doing of the railways, which had disestablished the coaches, and brought desolation upon this road, in common with most others. But in the dawn of the new era of road travel the present proprietor bought the house, and has by degrees reinstated those stone mullions which had been torn from the windows and replaced at some extraordinarily inappreciative period by modern sashes ; and has wi'ought altogether, a wonderful trans- formation. The " Lygon Arms," is now as stately a hostelry as ever it was. I reach the old town of Chipping Campden by another route, and so will not climb on this occasion the steep, mile-long Broadway Hill by which you come this way to it. I will turn instead further south, to Winchcombe. Winchcombe, it may be thought, is a far cry from Stratford-on-Avon. It is twenty-four miles distant, but though twenty-four miles formed in olden days a very much more considerable journey than now, the place and its surroundings were familiar to Shakespeare. If you would seek here local allusions in the plays, wherewith to belabour the Bacon fanatics, there is no lack in this district of " Cotsall," those Cots wolds on which Page's fallow greyhound was outrun : a portion of those " wilds in Gloucestershire," whose " high wild hills and rough uneven ways. Draw out our miles and make them wearisome," as Northumberland complains in King Richard the Second. Shakespeare knew most that was to be known about 215 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the Cotswold Hills, and when he makes Shallow bid Davy "sow the headland with red wheat," he alludes to an olden local custom of sowing " red lammas " wheat early in the season. He was familiar with the consistency of Tewkesbury mustard, \\dth which, doubtless, the Stratford folk of his day relished their meat, and he finds in it an apt illustration of a dull man's attempted sprightliness : as where he makes Falstaff say, " He a good Avit, hang him baboon ! His wit is as thick as Tewkesbury mustard." Here, in the neighbourhood of Winchcombe, familiar rhymes, generally uncomplimentary, upon surrounding places are attributed to him almost as freely as are those upon the " Eight Villages." They tell of— " Dirty Gretton, Dinjry Greet, Beg'gfarly Wiiiclicombe, Sudeley sweet ; Hanging Hartsliorn, A^'hittington Bell, Dull Andoversford, and Merry Frog Mill." The epithets vary with the different narrators of the lines. Those quoted above do not in general fit the places, except beautiful Sudeley and perhaps " once upon a time " Frog Mill, which, in spite of its name was prob- ably of old a sufficiently merry place, for it is the name of an ancient and once renowned inn adjoining Andovers- ford : an inn where men made merry until the railway came hard by and disestablished its custom. Winchcombe it is difficult to believe ever " beggarly." It is an old and picturesque market town in the Cots- wolds, with a noble and particularly striking Perpen- dicular church, with clerestoried nave and central tower, and an array of monstrously gibbering gargoyles. Next it is a curious old inn, oddly named the " Corner Cup- board." Here, too, at the " George " inn, are some traces of the hostelry formerly maintained by the Abbots 216 'OLD JOHN NAPS' of Winchcombe for pilgrims to their altars. Sudeley Castle, in its park a mile away, is a place of great interest, now restored, with a modern altar-tomb and effigy to Catherine Parr, sixth and last wife of Henry the Eighth, who resided here. Gretton is a village two miles from Winchcombe, on the Tewkesbury road, and Greet is a wayside hamlet in between. We have no authority for the Shake- spearean authorship of the rhymes, but " old John Naps of Greece," who is mentioned with " Peter Turf and Henry Pimpernell " as cronies of Christopher Sly, was not " of Greece " but of this place. " Greece " is one of those many misprints that in the early folios and quartos continue to puzzle critics. In one of them Hamlet declares he can tell the difference between " a hawk and a handsaw," and it was long before " handsaw " was seen to be a printer's error for " heronshaw," a young heron. To emigrate John Naps from Greet to Greece was a comparatively easy matter, in type, if not in actual travel. We will allow, for argument's sake, that this by itself might not be convincing evi- dence that Shakespeare knew Greet and intended to refer to it ; but we have Davy, Shallow's servant in the Second Part of Henry the Fourth, referring to " William Visor of Woncot," who has an action at law against " Clement Perkes of the hill." By " Won- cot," is meant the hamlet of Woodmancote, three miles west of Winchcoiube, a place then and now called " Woncot," locally. The name, correctly spelt in the original edition of 1600, has been mistakenly altered to " Wincot," in later issues. At Woodmancote the family of Visor, sometimes spelled " Vizard," was in Shakespeare's time and until recent years living. It lies beneath Stinchcombe Hill, locally " the Hill," which rises to the imposing height of 915 feet. There, it has 217 SIBIMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND been ascertained, the Perkes family then had their home. The name of Perkes was various!}^ spelled *' Pm'kis " and " Purchas." The last representative appears to have been one " J. Purchas, Esq., of Stinch- combe Hill, near Dursley, Glos.," who is mentioned in the Gentleman's Magazine, 1812, as having died at Margate, in his seventy-fifth year. It is a tremendous and a beautiful view from the lofty plateau of Cleeve Common as you go from Winchcombe to Woodmancote and Bishop's Cleeve, on the way to Tewkesbury. I shall never forget the glory of that evening of early summer when, romping out of Chelten- ham, our car breasted the long rise to this view-point and we halted here as the Avestering sun sank across the golden-blue distance of the Vale of Avon, with the Malvern Hills, grey and indistinct, beyond. Distant views of the Promised. Land could have made no better j^romise of beauty and plenty. From this Pisgah height you come " down-a-down-a," as Ophelia says, to Bishop's Cleeve, thinking upon the sheer appropriateness of the place-name ; not the "Bishop" part of it, but the " Cleeve "; which stands of course for " cleft," or " cliff." Thenceforward, the way lies along the levels into Tewkesbury, through Stoke Orchard and Treddington. 218 CHAPTER XXII Tewkesbury. The little town of Tewkesbury, which numbers about 5500 inhabitants, and is one of the most cheerful and bustling, and withal one of the most picturesque towns in England, occupies a remarkable situation. Not remarkable in the scenic way, for a more nearly level stretch of very often flooded meadow lands you will not see for miles. The site of Tewkesbury is close upon, but not actually on, the confluence of England's greatest river, the broad and turbid and rather grim Severn, with the Avon. All around, but in grey and blue distances, are hills : the Cotswolds, the Bredon Hills, the greater Malverns, and the yet greater, but more distant Welsh mountains ; but the Severn and the Avon flow through levels that extend considerable distances. When those two rivers — so different in every respect ; in size, in character, and in the very colour of their waters, the Avon being clear and bright, and the Severn a sullen, dun-coloured waterway — unite to flood these low-lying lands the only way to travel comfortably about the neighbourhood is by boat. Tewkesbury is at all times particularly old-world and quaint, and it makes on these occasions an excellent substitute for Venice. This peculiarity, or rather this contingency, let us say, perhaps explains the at first sight rather singular fact that the town should have been built on the Avon, half a mile from its junction with the Severn, and not upon the larger river at all. It looks like a wanton disregard 219 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND of the advantages that the Severn navigation would bring to the town, with riverside wharves and quays ; but those who selected the site probably considered the Severn to be too dangerous a river, and so set their town back half a mile or so from its banks. A consequence is that the external trade of Tewkesbury has always been negligible, and to-day, although the text-books tell you of its industry of making shirt-fronts — ^" particularly stiff shirt-fronts " — and the olden one of flour-milling, which is carried on by Avonside, the scale of their activities has never become large. The founding of Tewkesbury is said to have been the work of a seventh-century religious Saxon named Theoc, who established a church here ; but the Roman station, Etocessa, was here first, and although the place-name is supposed to derive from Theoc, by way of " Theocs- byrig," and the Domesday version, " Teodechesberie," too little is known of him for us to take much interest in it. It is rather interesting, however, to consider that, the site being among water-meadows, and that the land at the confluence of Severn and Wye is called " the Ham," how very near Tewkesbury was to being called " Tewkesham." The monastery that was thus seated by the two rivers became a flourishing Benedictine house, and after its full share of the early adversities of fire and sword, famine and flood, it resulted in the building of the grand Abbey church, which is still the greatest architectural glory of the town. The re-founder of the monastery and builder of this noble and solemn example of Norman architecture was Robert Fitz Hamon, Earl of Gloucester, the greatest of the early Lords Marchers of Wales, and overlord of Glamorgan, who died in 1197, fighting in foreign wars. He had seen so many post-mortem bequests go wi'ong and never reach their intended 220 TEWKESBURY ABBEY destination that he determined to perform his re -founding of monastery and cliurch in his own hfetime. Both were well advanced when he died, and the Abbey was finally consecrated in 1223; a remarkable example of expedition for those times. I do not propose to narrate the story of the Abbey, which has no such picturesque and fantastic falsehoods as that of Evesham. The monastery ran its course and was suppressed with others by Henry the Eighth, and the Abbey church was saved by the townsfolk, who paid the King the equivalent of £5000 for the site and fabric. And so it remains to us to this day, more venerable by lapse of time, minus its Lady Chapel, and with evidences of the puritan zeal of rather more than a hundred years later than Henry's great reform ; but it is yet the veritable building of Fitz Hamon's and of the generations that succeeded him. You cannot see this great Abbey church to advantage from the town. It is only from the open meadows by the Severn, and its tributary brooks, where the little town is to be guessed at by the evidence of a few roofs and chimneys, that its great scale and solemn majesty are fully apparent. There the great central Norman tower and the magnificent and unique West Front of the same period are seen in their proper relation with the surroundings. The long outline is very like that of St. Albans, but 237 feet less ; St. Albans Abbey being 550 feet long, and Tewkesbury 313 feet. The near view of the West Front and its great and deeply-embayed Norman window, filled not unsuitably with the Perpendicular tracery of three hundred years later, is no disillusionment ; it is, after the glorious West Front of Peterborough, one of the most striking compo- sitions of the kind in England, and the flanking Norman tourelles and spirelets have by contrast the most delicate appearance. 221 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Entering the building, a massive Norman nave is seen, singularly like that of Gloucester cathedral, and no doubt designed by the same hand. The same massive but disproportionately lofty columns, with dwarfed triforium and clerestory, proclaim a similar origin. The columns are Fitz Hamon's work, and the clerestory above, and the stone -vaulted roof are the additions of over two centuries later, when the builders had grown more daring and risked a heavy stone roof in place of the former flat wooden one. Fitz Hamon's transepts also remain and his choir, in its essentials ; although in the same Decorated period which witnessed the addition of the clerestory and stone vaulting to the nave the Norman choir was remodelled. To this period belong the seven windows filled with splendid old stained glass, representing all good benefactors, from Fitz Hamon onwards, praying for heavenly grace, but clinging to their ancient heraldic cognisances of long descent as tenaciously as though the authority of Garter King-at- Arms and all his fellow-kings and pursuivants extended to Heaven, and St. Peter was authorised to admit to the best places only those who could display these patents of gentility. It is glorious old glass, more than much damaged and time-worn, but still splendid in design and colour. Behind the choir still runs the semicircular ambu- latory, as on the old Norman plan, but the Lady Chapel has disappeared. Here too are some of the ancient chapels formerly clustered about the east end. Here are soine mouldering swords, deeply bitten into by Time's teeth, from the battlefield of Tewkesbury. Fitz Hamon's chantry is not of his period : it was rebuilt more than three hundred years later ; proof that he, and the health of his immortal part were kept in mind, and incidentally showing us that not all gratitude is, 222 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND as cynics would declare, " a lively sense of favours to come." The so-called " Warwick " chantry, built 1422 by Isabel le Despencer in memory of her first husband, Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Abergavenny, is in the last, and most elaborated style of Gothic architecture and decoration. There are many other monuments : including the beautiful one of Hugh le Despencer and his viiie Elizabeth. Their splendidly sculptured ala- baster figures lie there with a calm indifference con- trasting with his violent end, for he was executed in 1349, at Hereford. So often did the great nobles of those centuries suffer from the headsman's axe and with such frequency did they die on the battlefield that it became a matter of pride to declare how rarely they ended peacefully and of old age, in their beds. It was almost a slur upon one's personal character to pass in this way, when one might in the last resource join some desperate rebellion and be handsomely slain ; or at the very least of it, be taken and properly beheaded. These philosophical and historical considerations bring one, by a natural transition, to the Battle of Tewkesbury, fought in the meadoAvs to the south of the towTi on May Day 1471. The place where the fight raged fiercest was close by the Gloucester road, in the field still called " Bloody Meadow," whose name it is understood the town council, in the interests of the rising generation, are keenly desirous of seeing changed to something more respectable. If you have never been to Tewkesbury, the battle will be a little unreal to you. You may know perfectly well "all about the war, and what they killed each other for," and you may even be a partisan of either White Rose or Red, and may throw up your cap for those rival 224 THE BATTLE OF TEWKESBURY Houses of York or Lancaster ; but if you have never visited the scene where this great fight raged, it will remain shadowy. But in Tewkesbury town, whose streets are still astonishingly rich in old timbered houses that stood on the morning of that great clash of arms where they do now, it is a vital thing. It was the last desperate venture of the Lancastrians, stricken to the ground on many an earlier occasion, but always hitherto recovering, to try conclusions again, for sake of right. At To^\i:on, Blore Heath, Hexham, and other places they had been slaughtered, and such victories as Wakefield, in which the Yorkists were decimated, were of no permanent value. Only a month before Tewkesbury they had been signally defeated at Barnet, and their cause apparently broken ; but here again the party was re-formed. Queen Margaret, whose devotion and sorrows are among the inost pitiful records of history, had come from France with her son, Prince Edward, the young hope of the Red Rose. Gathering a force at Exeter, they advanced towards the midlands, hoping to join hands with Welsh sympathisers. But the treacherous Severn, coming down from those Mortimer borderlands where the White Rose had ever been strongest, proved itself on this occasion the most useful ally of the Yorkists. It was in flood and pre- vented that junction of the two Lancastrian armies whose combined force might have given them the day and changed the course of the nation's story. The Yorkists, commanded by Edward the Sixth, came up from the direction of Cheltenham and found their opponents drawn up on the " plains near Tewkesbury," as Shakespeare has it, in the Third Part of Henry the Sixth. The battle was lost to the Lancastrians partly through their being deceived by a pretended flight of the troops commanded by Richard, Duke of Gloucester, Q 225 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND and in a great measure by quarrels among themselves. Their ranks were broken and the battle was continued and ended by fighting and heavy slaughter in the streets of the town. Finally the defeated Lancastrians took refuge in the Abbey church, from which they would have been dragged had not the monks in solemn procession prevented it. Shakespeare adopts Holinshed's account of the death of Prince Edward. Holinshed tells us that proclamation being made that a life -annuity of £100 should be paid to whoever brought the Prince, dead or alive, and that, if living, his life should be spared, Sir Richard Crofts brought him forth, " a fair and well-proportioned young gentleman, whom, when King Edward had well-advised, he asked him how he durst so presumptuously enter his realm with banner displayed, whereupon the prince boldly answered, saying, ' To recover my father's kingdom and heritage from his grandfather to him, and from him after him to me lineally descended ' ; at which words King Edward thrust him from him, or (as some say) stroke him with his gauntlet, whom directly George, Duke of Clarence ; Richard, Duke of Gloucester ; Thomas Grey, and William, Lord Hastings, that stood by, cruelly murdered ; for the which cruel act the more part of the doers in their latter days drank the like cup by the righteous justice and due punishment of God. His body was homely interred in the church of the monastery of the black monks of Tewkesbury." The thanksgiving of the next day, Sunday, held by the Yorkists in the Abbey was one of those services in which the victors in a battle have always adopted the Almighty as a partisan. In the same time-honoured fashion the King of Prussia, delighting in the defeats of the French in the war of 1870-71, was in the habit of exclaiming " Gott mitt uns," and sending pious 226 Q 2 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND telegrams to the Queen, caricatured by the humorist of the time — " Rejoice witli me, my dear Augusta, V\'e've had auotlier awful buster ; Ten thousand Frenchmen sent below — Praise God from u-hom all blessings flow I " The thanksgiving was followed next day by a ruthless, cold-blooded massacre of those who had been hiding in the town. On the Tuesday the great nobles, leaders in the fight, were executed, and the Yorkist vengeance was complete. The nodding old gabled houses of Tewkesbury— many of them nodding so amazingly that it is surprising they do not fall — include a number of ancient inns : the " Wheatsheaf " and the " Bell " prominent among them. The " Bell," hard by the Abbey and the old flour-mills, has a bowling-green and owns associations with Mrs. Craik's once-popular story, John Halifax, Gentleman : which, I believe, was considered eminently a tale for the young person. " No," said a bookseller long since, in my own hearing, to a hesitating prospective purchaser, "it is not a novel : it is an improving story, and may be read on Sundays." I do not know what is read by the young person nowadays, either on Sundays or week-days, but I am quite sure it is not John Halifax, Gentleman, and I am equally sure that the young person will in these times resent any choice made for him or her, and read or not read what he or she chooses. But the monument to Mrs. Craik in the Abbey is inscribed to the author of the book, and as it is evidently a great source of interest to visitors, John Halifax is perhaps not quite so out-of-date as we suppose him to be. The " Hop Pole " and the " Swan," in their present form, belong to a later age ; the first being the house 228 THE 'OLD BLACK BEAR' where Mr. Pickwick and his friends made merry and drank so astonishingly. But the " Old Black Bear," as you leave the town for Worcester, is easily the most picturesque of all ; in itself and in its situation by the rugged old Avon bridge. The sign was, of course, originally that of the " Bear and Ragged Staff." 229 CHAPTER XXIII Clopton House — Billesley — Tlie Home of Shakespeare's Mother, Wilmcote — Aston C'antlow — Woottoii Waweu — Shakespeare Hall, Rowiiigtou. There is a mansion of much local fame rather more than a mile out of Stratford, off the Henley road : the manor-house of Clopton, for long past the seat of the Hodgson family, but formerly that of one of the ancient families of Clopton, who are found not only in Warwick- shire and Gloucestershire, but in Suffolk as well. Wide- spread as they once were, I believe that the very name is now extinct. There is necessarily much mention of the Clopton name in these pages, for Sir Hugh Clopton was the great fifteenth-century benefactor of Stratford. He was a younger son of the o^vner of this manor. The house has been time and again altered and partly rebuilt, but it still contains portraits of the Cloptons on the great Jacobean staircase, and painted on the walls of an attic, once used as a secret chapel by Roman Catholics, are to this day the black-letter texts upon which Ambrose Rookwood, prominent in the Gunpowder Plot of 1605, must have looked. He had rented Clopton House for a time, in order to be conveniently near his friends, and to the meeting-place on Dunsmore, which the con- spirators had appointed the scene of their rebellion when King and Parliament should have been blown sky- high by Guy Fawkes' thirty-two barrels of gunpowder. After the failure of the plot and the arrest of the 230 CLOPTON conspirators, the High Baihff of Stratford was instructed to seize Ambrose Rookwood's effects at Clopton House. An inventory of them is preserved in the Birthplace Museum at Stratford, and affords some quaint reading. Chahces, crosses, crucifixes, and a variety of obviously Papist articles, are in company with " an oulde cloake bagge," whose value was sixpence, and " a wliite nagge," twenty shillings. The High Bailiff evidently cleared the house, taking all he could find, for mention is made of " one pair of old boots, 2d. these being the goods of Ambrose Fuller." There is a further note that Ambrose Fuller had his old boots restored to him ; the High Bailiff being presumably unable to find anything treasonable in them. Shakespeare is said to have taken his idea of Ophelia from Margaret Clopton, who in the misery of dis- appointed love is supposed to have drowned herself in a well in the gardens in 1592. A Charlotte Clopton, too, is supposed to have been buried alive in the Clopton vault in Stratford church in 1564, when the plague visited the neighbourhood, and thus to have given Shakespeare a scene in Romeo and Juliet. But it is only fair to say that the stories are legendary and not sustained by any known facts in the Clopton family history. From Clopton we will retrace our steps to Stratford, and thence set out anew, to visit some outlying villages of interest, better reached from the road to Alcester. The Alcester road is the least interesting road out of Stratford. It leads past the Great Western Railway station, and thence up Red Hill, reaching Alcester, the Roman Alauna, in seven and a half miles. There is little joy or interest to be got out of Alcester, which is a pleasant enough little town of 3500 inhabitants and a manufacture of needles, but not thrilling. There is 231 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND still some unenclosed land along this road, on the left, a rather wild upland common — the " unshrubb'd down " ; and it is a tumbled up and down country on the right, where Billesley stands. Billesley is a parish, with a parish church and an ancient manor-house, but no village. I can imagine the tourist — the cyclist, of course, who is a more enterprising person than most — saying, as he sees Billesley on the map, " I will put up there," and I can imagine him, further, getting there under circumstances of night and rain and wind, and finding it to be the most impossible of places to stay at. For there is no inn, and not the slightest chance of hospitality. But it is well enough if you come to it in daytime, for it has the charm of singularity : the strange- ness of the old manor-house behind its lofty enclosing garden-walls and the weirdly rebuilt eighteenth-century church at the end of a farm-road which you dispute with porkers and cluttering fowls. Billesley church is one of the claimants for the honour of witnessing Shake- speare's marriage, but on what evidence the claim rests no one can tell, and, in any case, it was entirely rebuilt afterwards. The tradition is probably only a hazy association with the marriage of his grand -daughter, Elizabeth Hall, whose wedding took place in the former building in 1639. Little belief, either, can be given to the panelled room in Billesley Hall, said to have been a library in Shakespeare's youth, in which he was allowed to study. Downhill and to the right, and you come to Wilmcote, the home of Shakespeare's mother, Mary Arden. It was in her time merely a hamlet of Aston Cantlow, but is now a separate ecclesiastical parish, with an un- interesting church. Wilmcote is not a particularly inviting place, and not one of a number of boys playing cricket could tell me where was the home of Shake - 232 WILMCOTE speare's mother. However, in a place like Wilmcote it does not take long to solve such a point, even if it were to come to a house-to-house inquiry. The home of the Ardens, yeomen-farmers, seems to modern ideas quite a humble house. It is one of a row of ancient timber- framed and plastered cottage-like houses, with a large farmyard at the back. Rambling, low-ceilinged rooms THE ARDEN HOUSE, HOME OF SHAKESPEARE S MOTHER, WILMCOTE. with ingle-nooks in the fireplaces form the interior. Some day, I suppose, when the Shakespeare Birthplace Trust has ceased to expend much money in the collection of rare editions and in paying fat pensions to its super- annuated servants, it will seek to purchase the Arden home, and show to Shakespearean travellers the house in which Robert Arden, a sixteenth-century yeoman of some standing and some pretensions to gentility, yet sat at table with his farm-servants in the old way, just as in the remoter parts of the West of England is still done. 233 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND It is generally supposed that Wilmcote is the place referred to by Shakespeare in the induction to the Taming of the Shrew as " Wincot." The name is locally pronounced in that way, as it would be when we consider the difficulty in ordinary rustic speech of twisting the tongue round " Wilmcote." But reasons are given on p. 169 for identifying it with Wincot in Quinton. There is, however, another place which claims the honour ; the unlovely Wilnecote, a brick and tile -manufacturing settlement on the Watling Street, over twenty-five miles distant. It also is locally " Wincot," and in Shake- speare's time brewed a famous tipple. Sir Aston Cokain, whose verses were published as near Shake- speare's own day as 1658, had no difficulty in identifying it. Writing to his friend, Mr. Clement Fisher, who resided at Wilnecote, whom he addresses " of Wincott," he says — '^'^ Shakespeare your AV^incot ale liath much renowu'd Tliat fox'd a beggar so by chance was found Sleeping that there needed not many a word To make him to believe he was a lord. But you affirm (and in it seem most eager) 'Twill make a Lord as drunk as any beggar. Bid Norton brew such ale as Shakespeare fancies. Did put Kit Sly into such lordly trances ; And let us meet there for a lit of gladness, And drink ourselves merry in sober sadness." It is quite evident, among other things, that Sir Aston Cokain wrote pretty bad verse, but the point to be emphasised is that there were certainly in Shakespeare's time three " Wincots," any one of which might have served his turn. But the vanished ale-house of Wincot in Quinton is the place more particularly meant by him. " Stephen Sly " alluded to in the play, was a real person who seems to have been what people call " a character." He was probably a half-witted creature, 234 WOOTTON WAWEN the butt of Stratford, and occasionally appears in the unimpeachable records of the town as a servant of the Combes of Welcombe, or as a labourer. There also appears in those same chronicles in later years a Joan Sly, who was fined in 1630 for travelling on the Sabbath : an offence not so great in itself, but very reprehensible in the eyes of the Puritan magistrates of that time. The parent village of Aston Cantlow is two miles from Wilmcote. The site only of the ancient castle of the Cantilupes remains, behind the church, in a tangled moat still sometimes flooded by the little river Alne. The old Court House, a long half-timbered building now divided into three or four cottages, is the chief feature of the village street. Wootton Wawen, in something less than another three miles, owes the first part of its singular name to its olden situation in the Forest of Arden, and the second part to the Saxon lord of the place, a landowner named Wagen, whose name appears as witness to the founda- tion charter of the monastery at Coventry founded by Leofric, the husband of Godiva, in 1043. It stands at a junction of roads, where the highway from Stratford through Bearley comes swinging up round a corner from the channels of the Alne, and runs, broad and imposing, on to Henley-in- Arden and Birmingham. The church, occupying a knoll, is a strange but beautiful group, with central tower in the Decorated style, a rather plain south chapel of the same period, and a beautiful nave clerestory of the fifteenth century. A very large Decorated chancel east window has its moulding set with elaborate crockets. The stranger, attracted by this noble church, tries the door. It is locked, but before he can turn away it will be opened by a girl, who says, " There is a fee of sixpence." There always is ! 235 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND You render tribute for sake of seeing the interior, uneasily suspecting that it is another sixpence gone towards some scheme of alteration which would not have your approval ; but these things cannot be helped. The interior discloses some unexpected features, the lower part of the tower being unmistakably Saxon SHAKESPEARE HALL, RO\\^NGTON. work, \\'ith very narrow arches to nave and chancel. Here are two curious enclosed carved oak pews that were perhaps originally chantries, and a fine fifteenth- century oak pulpit. A desk with eight chained books, and an ancient chest with ironwork in the shape of fleurs-de-lis, together with effigies and brasses to the Harewell family, complete an interesting series of antiquities. Here is buried William Somerville, author of The Chase, who died in 1742. 236 'SHAKESPEARE HALL' The town of Henley-in-Arden, with its broad and picturesque street and the " White Swan " inn, is much afflicted in these latter days by excessive motor traffic from Birmingham. Beaudesert, a seat of the Marquis of Anglesey, adjoins it, and Preston Bagot, on the east, lies in a once-remote district. The sign of the " Crab Mill " inn, on the way, alludes to a former manufacture of cider here. The old manor-house of Preston Bagot, beside the road, is locally said to have been the first house built in the Forest of Arden, but of that we cannot, obviously, be at all sure. There is a house about four miles onward, at Rowington Green, on the other side of Rowington, which looks, in parts, older. It is the romantic-looking house known as " Shakespeare Hall," for many years a farmhouse, but now the residence of Mr. J. W. Ryland, F.S.A. It dates back to the early part of the fifteenth century, and had until recently a moat. Traditionally, it was the home of one Thomas Shakespeare, a brother of William Shakespeare's father ; and Shakespeare is further said to have composed As You Like It in the room over the porch. We need not believe that tradition, which has no evidence to warrant it, although the house was once the home of one of the very numerous Shakespeare families in Arden, the poet's family were relations. The massive horseman's " upping-block " has been allowed to remain, beside the front-door. 237 CHAPTER XXIV ^V^elcombe — Snitterfiekl — ^^'^arwick — Leicester's Hospital — St. Mary's Cliurcli and the Beauchamp Chapel. The distance between Stratford and Warwick is eight miles, and the road, the broad highway, runs direct. It is an excellent road, but for those who do not care overmuch for main routes, however beautiful, in these times, a more excellent way, for a portion of the journey at any rate, is by Snitterfield. You turn off to the left from the tree-bordered main road at a point a mile and a half from Stratford, well in view of the lofty obelisk on the hillside at Welcombe which was built in 1873 to perpetuate the memory of the obscure person, a certain Mark Phillips, who had erected the mansion of Welcombe Lodge in 1869. Without the aid of this monument he would by now have been completely forgotten ; but it is 120 feet in height and prominently visible from amazing distances, and so its object is attained. Not perhaps exactly in the way originally intended, for being in a district where most things are associated in some way with Shakespeare, it is generally supposed to be one of them, and when the disappointed stranger finds himself thus deluded,- he usually reflects upon Mark Phillips in the most scathing terms. Up at Welcombe are those Dingles already referred to. The way to Snitterfield takes you uphill, past lands that once belonged to Shakespeare, and by a pond which is all that is left of the lake of Snitterfield Hall, a mansion demolished in 1820. Here the road has reached a 238 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND considerable height, commanding beautiful views down over the valley of the Avon at Hampton Lucy and Charlecote. Snitter field village is embowered amid elms. The church is a rustic building in the Decorated style, with seventeenth-century pulpit and enriched woodwork of the same period furnishing the altar -rails. Here the Rev. Richard Jago was vicar for twenty years, dying in 1781. His duties did not bear heavily upon him, and he occupied most of his time in ^\Titing a long poem, " Edgehill, or the Rural Prospect Delineated and Moralised," a published work which no one ever reads, the prospect of moralising held forth on the title-page scaring the timid. His vicarage remains, and on its lawn are still the three silver birches planted by his three daughters. There are some beautiful lime-trees and an ancient yew in the churchyard. No relic of Henry Shakespeare, William Shakespeare's uncle, or of his father or grandfather, who lived at Snitterfield, now remains. The road now trends to the right, and, steeply de- scending, regains the main route into Warwick. The town of Warwick looms nobly before the traveller approaching from the west. The broad level highway makes direct for it, and over the trees that border the road you see, as a first glimpse of the historic place, the lofty tower of St. Mary's church, rising apparently an enormous height, and looking a most worshipful specimen of architecture. On a nearer approach it sinks into less prominence, and, passing through an old suburb, with a porch-house on the right, formerly the " Malt-Shovel " inn, the West Gate of the town, with its chapel above it, takes prominence. The West Gate is one of the two surviving ancient gateways of Warwick and leads steeply up into the 240 LEICESTER S HOSPITAL: THE CdUKTVAKO. [To face p. '240. LEICESTER'S HOSPITAL town beneath a rude-ribbed arch of great massiveness, based sturdily upon the dull red sandstone rock. It is a very picturesque and in every way striking composition, and if it were not for the even more picturesque scene provided by Leicester's Hospital, just within the gate, would be often illustrated. But the nodding black and white gables of that almshouse effectually attract the greater notice. The West Gate, with the chapel above, dates from about 1360. Nowadays it is almost only the curious visitor who passes through the long, tunnel-like arch, gazing with astonishment at the sudden outcrop of rock on which the building stands, and at the ribbed stone roof supporting the chapel. A roadway has been made to the right of the gate, through the town walls, and the traffic goes that way by choice, obscuring the ancient defensive function and importance of this entrance to the rown. A chapel also occupies the like position over the East Gate, and shows that the people of Warwick prayed as well as watched. The Leicester Hospital, so-called because founded by Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, looks down with admirable effect from its elevated position on the left hand, as you come up into the town ; but it would look even better if it were properly kept. It very urgently needs a thorough overhauling, not in the necessity for any structural repairs, but with the object of treating the buildings in a sympathetic and cultured way. There is a vast difference between photographic views of what is called, in the Wardour Street way, " Ley- cester's " Hospital, and the actual effect of looking upon the place with one's own eyes. The Hospital, in" fact, looks very much better in photographs than it reveals itself to the disappointed gaze : simply because those responsible for the upkeep of it do not understand K 241 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND how to treat the old timbers, and have smeared them over with black paint. This Hospital or Almshouse occupies the site of the ancient united religious and charitable guilds of Holy- Trinity and St. George -the -Martyr, ^vith some of their surviving buildings. These united fraternities had numerous activities. They supported the priests who served in the chapels over East and West gates, and contributed towards the keep of others in the parish church ; being also largely responsible for the mainten- ance of the great bridge, now and for long past in ruins, which carried the Banbury road across the Avon, in front of Warwick Castle. They also supported eight poor persons of the Guild. In common with all other religious, or semi-religious institutions, the Guild was dissolved in the time of Henry the Eighth, and its buildings were granted by Edward the Sixth to Sir Nicholas le Strange, from whom Dudley acquired them ; or, according to another version of these transactions, Dudley had a gift of them direct from the town of Warwick, to which the Guild had voluntarily transferred its property. This gift to the magnificent Dudley, the newly-created Earl of Leicester and possessor of vast wealth and power, was not for his own personal advan- tage, but for the purpose of helping him to establish an almshouse, which he at once proceeded to do, in the interest of " twelve impotent persons, not having above £5 per annum of their own, and such as either had been, or should be maimed in the warrs of the Queen, her service, her heirs and successors, especially under the conduct of the said Earl or his heirs, or had been tenants to him and his heirs, and born in the Counties of Warwick or Gloucester, or having their dwelling there for five years before ; and in case there happen to be none such hurt in the Warrs, then other poor of Kenilworth, 242 LEICESTER'S HOSPITAL Warwick, Stratford super Avon in this county, or of Wootton under Edge or Erlingham in Gloucestershire, to be recommended by the Minister and Churchwardens where they last had their aboad; which poor men are to have Liveries (viz. Gowns of blew cloth, with a Ragged Staff embroydered on the left sleeve) and not to go into the Town without them." Leicester and his magnificence, and all the direct lineage of the Dudleys have disappeared long ago. Leicester himself, and after him his brother Ambrose, died childless, and the patronage of the Hospital passed to their sister Mary, who married Sir Henry Sidney of Penshurst. Thence it has descended to Lord de L'isle and Dudley, the present representative of the Dudleys and the Sidneys. The entrance is by a stone gateway bearing the inscription " Hospitivm Collegiatvm Robert! Dvdlei Comitis Leycestriae 1571." The great Dudley's pictur- esque buildings deserve to be better kept, for they are among the daintiest examples of highly enriched half- timbering in England. Passing beneath an archway with a sundial overhead, you enter a small quadrangle with a quaint staircase on one side, and gables with elaborate pierced verge -boards looking down upon the scene. The famous Warwick badge of the Bear and Ragged Staff surmounts the finials and lurks under the eaves, in frequent repetition, together with the Porcu- pine, that of the Sidneys. On the further side, over the windows of the Master's Lodge, is the painted inscription, " Honour all men ; love the brotherhood ; fear God ; and honour the King," a quadripartite in- junction which we may confidently affirm, no man ever yet observed. Our own — but much more other people's — natures will have to be very greatly amended before we are prepared to " honour all men." R 2 243 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND You pay sixpence to be shown over the Hospital, and one of the twelve bedesmen acts as guide to the buildings and the very miscellaneous collections ac- cumulated in them. Nowadays the " blue gown " has become black, and the Bear and Ragged Staff badge is in silver, instead of embroidery. A welcome change has come over their headgear. Instead of the more or less rusty silk hats they wore during the greater part of the nineteenth century, they have now a " beefeater " hat similar to those worn by the Tower warders in London, but wholly in black. The bedesmen no longer dine together as once they did, but each separately in his own quarters, because they could not always obey the injunction to " love the brotherhood," and grew cantankerous in company, and quarrelled; but here is still the kitchen they have in common, con- taining many other things one does not expect to find in kitchens ; an odd assortment, a Malay ki'is, a Russian helmet from the stricken fields of the Crimea, an oak cabinet from Kenilworth Castle, and a framed piece of needlework said to have been executed by Lady Robert Dudley, whom " historians " will persist in styling either by her maiden name. Amy Robsart, or else by the title of Countess of Leicester, she having died or been murdered many years before her husband became an Earl. Perhaps we had better emphasise the word said. Beneath that framed piece of needlework is a Saxon — more or less Saxon — chair. A piece of Gibraltar rock, polished, is a further item displaying the catholicity of taste displayed here, together with the muskets with which the inmates of the Hospital were armed when the Chartist rising was supposed to threaten the security of Warwick. The banqueting hall, a surviving portion of the old Guild buildings, very greatly needs restoration. It has 244 ST. MARY'S been grossly used and subdivided, the Minstrel Gallery- having been taken out of it in order to provide a fine additional room for the Master's residence; the Master being, of course, a clergyman with a fine fat stipend : the person who has the very best of it at Leicester's Hospital. In this once-beautiful banqueting hall, with its noble roof of Spanish chestnut, whitened with age, James the First was entertained by Fulke Greville in 1617. Coal-bins and wash-houses now subdivide it. Flights of stone stairs lead up from the Hospital over the West Gate and into the chapel, a fine spacious building where the twelve old men have to attend every week-day morning at ten o'clock and listen to the perfunctory service read by the Master. In addition to this spiritual treat, they attend service at the parish church on Sundays. There is nothing to say about the interior of the chapel ; it was " restored " by Sir Gilbert Scott, and so there would not be. For dulness and pretentious ugliness combined, the town of Warwick would be difficult to match; and the ugliest and dullest part of it is that main street called Jury Street, stretching between the West Gate and the East. The ugliness is due to the great fire of 1694, which destroyed a great part of the town and necessi- tated a rebuilding at a period when architects were obsessed with the idea of designing " stately " buildings. What they considered stately we nowadays look upon with a shudder and style heavy and unimaginative. But the weirdest building in the town is that parish church of St. Mary whose tower looks in the distance so stately. There were once ten churches in Warwick and there are now but two. St. Mary's was almost entirely destroyed in the great fire, in consequence of the frightened townsfolk storing their furniture in it, for safety. The church itself was not threatened, 245 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND but some of the articles hurriedly placed in it were alight, and thus it shared the fate of much else. The rebuilding of St. Mary's was completed in 1704) as an inscription on the tower informs us. I think those who placed that inscription here intended a Latin pun, a play upon the name of Queen Anne and the word anno, for "year"; for thus it runs: " Annaeauspiciis A° memorabili 1704." One scarcely knows which is the more deplorable, the building or the pun ; the first, probably, because not every one can see the play upon words, but the tower is an outrage impossible to escape* The bulk and loftiness of it are majestic, but its classic details in a Gothic framework have a curious effect on the beholder. They seem, those unhallowed pagan alcoves, mounting stage by stage toward the skies, like some blasphemous insinuation. The nave and transepts, rebuilt at the same time, are, oddly enough, not nearly so offensive, and it is rather a hand- some as well as imposing interior that meets the stranger's gaze. It may be that it seems so much better because, warned by the outside, one expects so much worse. That familiar ornament in classic architecture, the " egg and dart," is an incongruous detail when worked into the capitals of columns in which the Gothic feeling predominates, and it sounds quite shocking when described ; but here it comes with a pleasing, if scarcely ecclesiastical effect in this fine and well-proportioned interior. The chancel of St. Mary's, together with the chapter- house on the north side of it and the Beauchamp Chapel on the south, escaped the fire, and remain un- injured to this day. It is possible to peer through the locked iron gates of the chancel from the nave, which is the only portion of the church that is to be seen without payment, but to see the chapter-house, and the Beau- 246 ST. ^fARY'S r-hamp C^hafx;!, to <\f:Sf/;u(\ to t.hf: crypt and f.o mo^nit the towor, you must, pay and pay and pay aj?ajn. TTic cler(^ in all the wide rarJius of thie Shak/ispeare 0>untry have the keenest scent for sixpr^nees, and would make excellent business men. Better business men thian cler^men, for all I know. Tliey have long sincM? learnt to charj/e and to keep their doors locked until their charj^cs are satisfied; and none understand the business better than those whjr> have the k/:;epinf( of St, Marv's at Warwick. But when you have paid for this and for that and for t'other, and are restinjj and reading?, and possih»ly makinj? notes in the nave, it is UToss, T say, and offensive and blackjruardly to h>e followed up and spied upon and to tx; asked if you are sketching ! '* Because if you are it will be half-a- crown." I will now leave this unsavoury subject, wishing the clergy and churchwardens of St. Mary's more enlightenment and the people they employ better discretion. The clrmncj:], or choir, founded by Thomas Beauehamp, twelfth Earl of Warwick, who died 1360, is a stately Perpendicnjlar work, with the altar-t/)mb of the founder and his wife Katharine, who died the same vear, in the middle. His armoured effigy, with crosses crosslet dis- played on the breastplate, rests its feet upon a bear, and at the feet of his wife is a lamb. He holds his wfe's hand. Around the tomb, in niches, are small figures repre- senting members of the family, thirty-six in all. In a grave near by, unmarked by any monument or in- scription, lies William Parr, brother of Katharine Parr, last and surviving wife of Henry the Eighth. He was created Marquis of Northampton, and died in 1.571, sunk to such poverty that no money was forthcoming to bury him. A few years later. Queen Elizabeth found 247 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND a trifle, and he was decently interred, but no one ever thought it worth while to mark his resting-place. Passing the greatly-enriched Easter Sepulchre in the north wall, the Chapter House is entered by a corridor. In the centre of this building stands the enormous monument to Fulke Greville, Lord Brooke, who was murdered by his man-servant in 1628. " Delaying to reward one Hayward, an antient servant that had spent the most of his time in attendance upon him," says Dugdale, " he received a mortall stab in the back by the same man, then private with him in his bed-chamber at Brooke House in London, 30th Sept. ann. 1628, who, to consummate the tragedy, went into another room, and, having lockit the dore, pierced his own bowells with a sword." The crypt is the oldest part of St. Mary's, with Norman pillars. It contains the old ducking-stool for scolding women. The entrance to that most gorgeous relic of old St. Mary's, the Beauchamp Chapel, which is the principal item in the list of these ecclesiastical showmen, is on the east side of the south transept. The mortuary magnifi- cence of the Beau champs obscures the dedication of the Chapel to Our Lady, and the generations that have passed since the building of it between the years 1443 and 1464, and its final consecration in 1475, have rightly agreed to style it by the name by which it now, and always has been, popularly known. It reminds one very keenly of the insincere modern cant phrase which forms the dedication of memorial stained-glass windows. " To the Glory of God and to the memory of ," a shabby sop to the Almighty at which the soul revolts. The very entrance is obviously proprietary, and shows us that this is really the Beauchamp mausoleum. It is a magnificent entrance, a very highly-enriched work in 248" THE BEAUCHAIMP CHAPEL panelled and sculptured stone, with the Warwick Bear and Ragged Staff on either side, facing the Beauchamp shield of crosses crosslet. Near it, on the wall, and green with neglect, is the fine brass to Thomas Beauchamp, thirteenth Earl of Warwick, who died in 1401, and of his wife Margaret, who died 1406. It seems strange that out of all the money contributed by visitors, and chiefly on account of the Beauchamp monuments, there cannot be some small surplus set aside for a restoration of the altar -tomb on which these figures were placed up to that time when the great fire destroyed it and much of the church. It is not well that so fine an example should remain on a wall ; the most unsuitable position for a monumental brass. The Earl, who is given the old original name of the Norman Beauchamps who came over with the Conqueror — " Bellocampo," meaning " fair field " — is in complete armour, which has, besides the crosses crosslet of the family arms, a decorative border of ragged staves around his helmet. The Countess is habited in an heraldic mantle of crosses crosslet. This Thomas Beauchamp was not so great or dis- tinguished a man as his son, in whose honour the Beauchamp Chapel was erected. The Beauchamp Chapel is slightly below the level of the south transept and is entered down a flight of steps. Photographs give an exaggerated idea of its size, but scarcely do justice to its beauty and the extreme richness of its details, still remarkable, although the ancient coloured glass has been mostly destroyed and the golden images of the altar have disappeared. It is indeed due to the second Lord Brooke, who although a partisan of the Cromwellian side during the Civil War, was naturally keen to preserve the glories of Warwick, that the Chapel was not wholly destroyed in that age of tumults. Lord Brooke was the son of that Sir Fulke 249 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Greville, first Baron Brooke, to whom James the First had granted Warwick Castle in 1605, and he no doubt looked upon the Beauchamps as ancestors, although there was never the remotest connection between that ancient martial family and his own, the Grevels, or Grevilles, who descend from the old avooI -merchants of the name at Chipping Campden and elsewhere in the Cotswolds. He adopted them, and took them over, so to speak, with the Castle ; and a good thing too, for these old monuments, that they had so fortunate an adoption. The building is in the middle period of the Perpen- dicular style, that last manifestation of the Gothic spirit and the feudal ages, and is elaborately groined in stone. The great Richard Beauchamp, who lies here in these gorgeous surroundings, directed by will the building of the Chapel and the erection of his monument. He was the greatest as yet of his name, and appears to have been perfectly conscious of it, if we may judge by the state in which he ordained to lie. He was also to prove the greatest to all time, for although his son Henry who succeeded him at his death in 1439 was created Duke of Warwick, his career was undistinguished and soon ended, for he died in 1445. With him ended the long line of his race. Richard Beauchamp, fourteenth Earl of Warwick, whose effigy lies here in lonely magnificence on the altar-tomb he directed to be made, as though he were too great a personage to have his wife beside him, was holder of the greatest offices of State of his period. The long inscription round his tomb tells us of some of these responsible posts — " Preieth devoutly for the Sowel whom god assoille of one of the moost worshipful Knights in his dayes of monhode and conning Richard Beauchamp, late Earl 250 THE GREAT BEAUCHAMP of Warrewik, lord Despenser of Bergevenny and of mony other grete lordships whos body resteth here vnder this tumbe in a fulfeire vout of stone set on the bare rooch the whuch visited with longe siknes in the Castel of Roan therinne decessed ful cristenly the last day of April the yer of oure lord god A niccccxxix, he being at that tyme Lieutenant gen'al and governer of the Roialme of ffraunce and of the Duchie of Norinandie by sufficient Autorite of oure Sou'aigne lord the King Harry the vi., the whuch body with grete deliberacon' and ful worshipful conduit Bi See And by lond was broght to Warrewik the iiii day of October the yer aboueseide and was leide with ful solemn exequies in a feir chest made of stone in this Chirche afore the west dore of this Chapel according to his last wille and Testament therin to rest til this Chapel by him devised i' his liff were made Al the whuche Chapel founded on the Rooch And alle the membres thereof his Execu tours dede fully make and Apparaille By the Auctorite of his Seide last Wille and Testament And therafter By the same Auctorite Theydide Translate fful worshipfully the seide Body into the vout abouseide, Honured be god therfore." History comes in few places with such vivid reality to the modern person as it does here. Unmoved, because too often without the mental agility to perceive the significance of it, we look upon the old royal arms of England as they were for centuries, until the time of George the Third, and see the quartering of the Lions of England with the Lilies of France; that proud boast, an idle pretension long before Calais, the final French possession of England, was lost, in the reign of Queen Mary. But standing before the tomb of the great Beauchamp, and reading his sounding titles, no mere ornamental designations, but the veritable responsible offices of State, as " Lieutenant-General and Governor 251 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND of the Realm of France and the Duchy of Normandy," we Hve again in tremendous days. No tomb of King or Emperor impresses me as does that of this puissant representative and viceroy of such sovereignty. Beneath a hooped frame or " hearse " of gilded brass which formed the support for a gorgeous pall of crimson velvet lies the effigy of this great soldier and statesman, also in brass, once highly gilt. His bared head rests upon his helmet and his feet upon a griffin and a muzzled bear, and the Garter is on his left leg. The arms are raised in the usual attitude of prayer, but the hands themselves are not joined, as usual. They are, instead, represented apart, in the priestly pose during the cele- bration of mass. The rich crimson velvet pall that covered the effigy and was lifted for its inspection by every visitor, was at last removed, on the plea of the injury it was supposed to be causing the figure, and has now unaccountably disappeared. In niches around the altar -tomb are little figures representing his family, and sons- and daughters-in-law : fourteen in all ; such great names as Henry Beauchamp, his son and successor, with his wife Cicely; Richard Neville, Earl of Salisbury and his wife Alice ; Richard Neville, afterwards Earl of Warwick and his wife Anne ; Edmund Beaufort, Duke of Somerset, and his wife Eleanor ; Humphrey Stafford, Duke of Buckingham, and his wife Anne ; John Talbot, Earl of Shrewsbury, and his wife INIargaret ; and George Neville, Lord Latimer, with his wife Elizabeth. Against the north wall of the Chapel is the costly and ostentatious monument of Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, rising in lofty stages of coloured marbles ; a vulgar piece of work. The effigies of Dudley and his wife Lsetitia, who survived him forty-six years and 252 THE LAST OF THE DUDLEYS died in 1634, are gorgeously robed and painted in life- like fashion. The mantle of the Order of the Garter covers his armour, and the Garter itself is shown on his leg. It is with surpassing interest that one looks upon the chief of these figures ; that Dudley who came near being King-Consort of Elizabeth, and died in 1588, at the comparatively early age of fifty-four ; the vain and magnificent creature suspected of the murder of his first wife and traditionally poisoned by his last, who is said to have given him the lethal cup he had intended for herself. A long Latin epitaph sonorously recounts his many titles and honours, with the hardy belief in "a certain hope of his resurrection in Christ." Against the opposite wall is the altar-tomb of that " noble Impe, Robert of Dudley," infant son of the last, who died in his fourth year, 1584. A circlet round the brow of the little figure bears the Leicester badge, the cinquefoil. Last of the Dudley monuments is the altar- tomb of Ambrose, styled the " good Earl," in tacit contradistinction from his brother Robert, the wicked one. The good Ambrose was not given length of days, for he died the year after his brother. He also is shown in armour and wears a coronet and the Garter. How he was given the post of " Mayster of the Ordinaunce," made Chief Butler of England, and was altogether a personage of many offices, his epitaph tells. With him and the " noble Liipe," his brother's infant son, the legitimate race of the Dudleys died. 253 CHAPTER XXV ^Varwick Castle. The great Castle of Warwick, now the seat of the Earl and Countess of Warwick, who formed themselves into a Limited Liability Company some fifteen years ago, under the title of the " Warwick Estates Co., Ltd.," has been the seat of the Grevilles since 1605. The origin of Warwick Castle goes back to Ethelfleda, daughter of Alfred the Great and wife of the then Earl of Mercia, a strenuous and warlike lady, to whom are attributed many ancient works. She is credited with building the first fortress in a.d. 915, on that knoll still known as " Ethelfleda's Mount," on which a Norman keep was subsequently erected, perhaps by that famous personage Turchil. In the family of Turchil the cognisance of the yet more famous Bear and Ragged Staff originated, which in all succeeding generations has descended from house to house of the distinguished families who have come into possession of Warwick Castle : the Houses of Beauchamp, Neville, Dudley, Rich, and Greville : not as their personal badge, but as that of the castellan for the time being of Warwick. A fantastic theory has been set afoot that, as Siward, son of Turchil, assumed the name " de Arden," thus founding the numerous knightly family of Ardens, Shakespeare, as the son of a Mary Arden, was probably the rightful owner of Warwick Castle ! We may safely say that this never occurred to Shakespeare himself, and may add him to one of that numerous class slyly alluded to 254 GUY OF WARWICK by Ingoldsby; people "kept out of their property by the rightful owners." The great Guy of Warwick, a giant in stature and doughty in deeds, is a myth, but that does not prevent his armour being shown in the Great Hall of the Castle. His period seems to be placed between that of Ethelfleda and Turchil, for the date of his death is put at a.d. 929. Mythical though he is, the later and very real flesh-and- blood Beauchamps, who came into possession of Warwick in the thirteenth century, w^ere often named " Guy " in allusion to him. His armour, like his legendary self, is a weird accretion of time, and is no longer displayed with the touching belief of less exacting times. The Age of Belief is dead, they say. Of belief in some things incredible, no doubt. He wore, according to the articles seen here, not only armour of tremendous size and weight, but of periods ranging from three hundred, to six hundred and ninety years after his death. A bascinet of the time of Edward the Third covered his head, his breastplate, weighing fifty pounds, is of the latter part of the fifteenth century, and the backplate belongs to the Stuart period. His shield weighs thirty pounds; his great ponderous sword, five feet six inches long, is of the time of Henry the Eighth. " Guy's breakfast cup, or porridge-pot " is equally wonderful, for it has a capacity of a hundred and twenty gallons. It is really an ancient iron cauldron, once used for cooking the rations of the garrison. The first historical Earl of Warwick was Henry de Newburgh, who died 1123; and by a succession of changes and failures of heirs the title and estates came to William de Beauchamp, husband of the daughter of William Mauduit. In the time of Guy, Earl of Warwick, son of this William, the Castle witnessed some stirring scenes. 255 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND The discontented nobles, troubled at the preference given by Edward the Second to his foreign favourite, Piers Gaveston, and at the apparent impossibility of perma- nently ridding the kingdom of him, seized that pestilent foreigner and confined him for a short time in a dungeon here. The favourite was by no means an acceptable person to the English barons, who although all directly de- scended from William the Conqueror's Frenchmen, had already been assimilated by this wonderful country of ours, and were as English as— well, let us say as English as any German Jew Goldstein or Schlesinger of modern times who, coming to these happy shores, suffers a sea-change into something rich and rare, and be- comes a new and strange " Gordon," or " Sinclair." They regarded this flippant Gascon from the south of France as an undesirable of the worst type, and could not and would not appreciate his jokes ; a natural enough disability when you come to consider them, for they were all at their expense. If you study the monu- mental effigies of those mediaeval barons and knights which are so plentifully dispersed throughout our country churches, you will readily perceive that although they were frequently very magnificent personages, their countenances do not often show any trace of intellectual qualities. Edward the Second was as flippant a person as his favourite, and when these stupid and indignant barons saw them laughing together, they knew very well, or keenly suspected, that they themselves were being laughed at. Did not this Gaveston fellow call the Earl of Lancaster " the play-actor," or " the fiddler," and the Earl of Lincoln " burst belly." Every one knew he called his father-in-law " fils a puteyne,'' or " whoreson." Guy, Earl of Warwick, was " the black hound of Arden." 256 THE 'BLACK DOG OF ARDEN ' " Let him call me hound : one day the hound will bite him," said the Earl. Meanwhile, Gaveston went on finding nicknames for every one, and made himself bitterly hated by those dull-minded barons who could not joke back at him. The worst of it was, his lance was as keen, and went as straight to the point, as his gibes. It was little use meeting him in single combat, for he unhorsed and vanquished the best. Hence this seizure of the hateful person. The story of it is told by Adam Murimuth — " The King wished Peter de Gavestone to be con- veyed to him by Lord Adamar de Valense, Earl of Pembroke, for safety; and, when they were at Danyn- tone next Bannebury, the same Earl sent him away in the night; and he went near to one place for this reason. And on the morrow in the morning came Guy, Earl of Warwyk, with a low-born and shouting band, and awakened Peter and brought him to his Castle of Warwyk and, after deliberation with certain elders of the king- dom, and chiefly with Thomas, Earl of Lancaster, finally released him from prison to go where he would. And when he had set out from the town of Warwyk even to the place called, somewhat prophetically, Gaveressich, he came there with many men making a clamor against him with their voices and horns, as against an enemy of the King and a lawful outlaw of the Kingdom, or an exile ; and finally beheaded him as such xix day of the month of June." So the " Black Dog " did indeed bite him to some effect. This tragic spot, is a place called Blacklow Hill, one mile north of the town. A monument to this misguided humorist, following his natural propensities in a land where humour is not appreciated, was erected on the spot by a Mr. Greathead, of Guy's Cliff House, in 1821. The inscription itself has a complete lack of humour — s 257 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND " In the hollow of this rock was beheaded, on the first day of July, 1312, by barons as lawless as himself, Piers Gaveston, Earl of Cornwall, the minion of a hateful king, in life and death a memorable instance of misrule." With this fierce " Black Dog of Ai'den," whose teeth were so sharp, the architectural history of the Castle becomes clear. He repaired and strengthened it, after the rough handling it had received in the Barons' War, in the reign of Henry the Third ; but to Thomas de Beauchamp, his grandson, is due Caesar's Tower, about 1360, and it was his son Thomas, who built Guy's Tower, named after the mjrthical giant, about 1394. It costs two shillings to see Warwick Castle. I believe if you happen to be a resident of Warwick or Leamington, there is a reduction of fifty per cent. The entrance is not so old as it looks, and was cut through the rock in 1800. It leads to the gloomy Barbican, whose overhanging walls give a truly mediaeval approach and form the completest contrast with the scene that opens beyond. The visitor enters a huge courtyard, now one vast lawn, nearly two acres in area ; with the residential portion of the Castle and its state-rooms on the left. Ahead is Ethelfleda's Mount, and on the right, guarding the curtain-wall at intervals, are Guy's Tower ; the incomplete Bear Tower, with its mysterious tunnel, the work of Richard the Third ; and the companion Clarence Tower, built by George, Duke of Clarence, his ill-fated brother, murdered in the Tower of London. Beside Ethelfleda's Mount is the Hill Tower. Immediately to the left of the entrance are the brew- house, laundry and then Caesar's Tower, with its gloomy dungeon, a most undesirable place of residence with vaulted stone roof and mouldy smells, meet for repentance and vain regrets. Here the " Black Dog " 258 PRISONERS' INSCRIPTIONS imprisoned the flippant Gaveston, and many later generations of prisoners passed weary times, scratching their not very legible records upon the walls for lack of employment. Among them is the record of one " Master John Smyth, gunner to the King," who appears to have been a prisoner here for the worse part of four years, in the hands of the Cromwellian partisan, Lord Brooke. We learn nothing further of the unfortunate gunner, nor why he was meted such hard measure. MafTER : lo/iN : Sm^th : Gvnek : to his : MAlESTj/E . Hlg^NES : WAS I A PrISNER IX THIS PIace : AND Ia^ here . /roM lQi2 tell th William SirfiaTE rot This same ANd i/ My Pen nxd Bin beter foR HIS SAKE I WOvlfi? have MEXrfEfi? EVERRi leTTER. Ma/ter 1642 345 lohn : Smj/th Gvner to H . maie/t^s : HigliNKs was a pRi/ivER IX This PIace In : tAe . ?/eare of ovr l ord 1642 : 345 iniserere ihs niary ihs mio Mr. William Sidiate (or possibly it is " Lidiate ") who thus, in the quaintest of lettering inscribed the sorrows of his friend the imprisoned gunner, appears to have been fully conscious of the eccentricity of his handiwork, but the inferiority of his " pen " — which was probably a rusty nail — can have had nothing to do with his weird admixture of "large caps," "upper case," "lower case " and italic type which I confidently expect will make the compositor of this page smile and sigh by turns. The Great Hall, with its armour and pictures and relics of Guy, is of course the chief feature of the long s 2 259 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND round of sight-seeing that makes Warwick Castle second to none as a show-place. It was greatly injured in the fire of December 1871, when many priceless relics were destroyed. Facsimile replicas of some have been made, and of the ancient armour which survived it has been said that there is no finer in the Kingdom, except that in the Tower of London. It is remarkable that although the Castle has passed from family to family, and some- times to families not related to their predecessors, the continuity of things has been maintained. Here is the mace of Richard Neville, Earl of Warwick, " the King- maker," who was slain in 1471 at the Battle of Barnet ; here are portions of the armour which belonged to Prince Edward, murdered at Tewkesbury, after the battle ; together with relics of the Dudleys, such as the miniature suit of armour made for the " noble Impe "; together with a helmet of the great Oliver Cromwell, and the suit worn by Lord Brooke, shot at the siege of Lichfield. His buff leathern jerkin was burnt in 1871, and that Ave now see is a facsimile of it. Here, too, are those preposterous relics of Guy, already mentioned, together with a rib of that Dun Cow of terrific story which he slew upon Dunsmore. The visitor will see that rib with surprise, and note that the cows of a thousand years ago were larger than ever he suspected. It is the rib of a whale. He would be a courtly, and perhaps also a tedious, writer who should essay to fully describe Warwick Castle? with its many suites of state-rooms, its gothic stone- vaulted servants' -hall, and its terraces, ponds, and gardens, together with the conservatories and that famous Roman antiquity, the so-called " Warwick Vase," found at Hadrian's Villa, near Rome in 1770, and purchased by the dilettante George, second Earl, from Sir William Hamilton. Great improvements have been 260 CESAR'S TOWER made here in the last few years, at tlie cost of "a httle damming and blasting," as was remarked at the time. Past the melancholy flymen who linger in the broad roadway opposite the entrance to the Castle, and wear jaundiced looks as though it were years ago since they had had a fare and expect it to be years yet before they will get another, you turn to the right into Mill Lane, narrow street of ancient houses, leading down to the river and to the site of that ancient mill where the feudal lords had their corn ground. The magnificence of state-rooms, the lengthy parade of family portraits, the beauty of the gardens, and the trimness of well-kept lawns do not serve the really cultivated visitor's turn in Warwick Castle. He pays his two shillings and is herded through with many others, a little browbeaten by the stale declamation of the gorgeous lackeys and by a very indigestion of sight- seeing. It is not a mediaeval fortress he has seen, but a private residence. In Mill Lane, however, you come into nearer touch with realities. Here, in this by far the most picturesque and unspoiled part of Warwick, where the bowed and time-worn brick or timber-framed houses are living out their life naturally, something of the ancient contrast between subservient town and feudal fortress may be gathered, softened dowTi, it is true, by the hand of time. Caesar's Tower is viewed at its best from the lower end of the lane, and looks from this point of view the noblest and the sternest tower the forceful military architects of the Middle Ages have given us, and well worthy of the great name of Caesar long ago conferred upon it by some unknown admirer of its dignity and massive beauty. It was somewhere about 13G0 when Caesar's Tower first arose upon the rocky bluff in which its foundations go deeply down. It was then called the 261 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Poictiers Tower. The purpose of this extremely strong and cunningly-planned work just here is lost to the modern casual observer, but if a keen glance is directed to the Avon flowing so closely by, it will be observed that although IMill Lane is now a lane butting up against the river bank and leading nowhere, the ruins of a very substantial stone bridge that once crossed the broad stream at this point are seen. This formerly carried the higli road from War^vick to Banbury, and when still in use brought the possibility of attack upon the Castle at this angle very near, and therefore to be provided against by the strongest possible defence. Hence those boldest of machicolations overhead, those arrow-slits in the skilfully-planned battlements above them, and that extraordinary double base with the bold slopes, seen in the accompanying illustration; a base whose purpose was to fling off with a tremendous rebound into the midst of an enemy the stones, the molten lead and pitch, and the more nasty, but not so lethal missiles with which a besieged garrison defended themselves. This base is quite solid rock, faced with masonry. In the upper part of it is seen the small barred Avindow that admits a feeble light into the dungeon already described. To-day the elms have gro\\'n up to great heights beside Caesar's Tower and assuage the grimness of it, and the only sounds are the cawings and gobbling noises of the rooks in their branches, or the unlovely cries of the Castle peacocks which strut across the lane in all their glory of colour. The tower rises 106 feet above its rocky basement. Those old military architects who designed and built it had not the least idea they were installing a picturesque feature. They had no knowledge at all of the pictur- esque ; but they assured themselves, as well as they could, that the safety of the Castle should be provided for. 262 C-ESAR S TOWER, WARWICK CASTLE. SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND And they did it so well that history will be studied in vain for a successful siege. This must have been a noble and imposing entrance to Warwick town in days of old. Then the road from London to Banbury crossed the ancient bridge and came up under this frowning tower and through the south gate of the town, along Mill Lane. The bridge, originally a narrow packhorse bridge of thirteen arches and of great antiquity, was widened in 1375 and the number of arches reduced to seven; and, thus remodelled, carried the traffic until 1790. This way came of necessity every traveller from London to "Warwick, and in this manner Queen Elizabeth entered the town and Castle in 1572. Warwick Castle was in those times less secluded from the streets than it now is. The feudal owners of it were not at all concerned to hide themselves away, but when the age of sight-seeing dawned and amateurs of the picturesque began to tour the country, they began to consider how they could ensure a complete privacy. It was effected by diverting the public highway. This was done at the instigation of George, second of the Greville Earls of Warwick, in or about 1790, when the new road and bridge were made, crossing the Avon considerably to the eastward. From that modern bridge, which cost £4000, only in part contributed by the Earl, who benefited most by the diversion, is obtained that view of the Castle so extravagantly praised by Sir Walter Scott. It is the only possible view, and not a good one : one by no means to be compared with that formerly obtained from the old bridge. Sir Walter Scott therefore either did not know what he was talking about, or was too much of a courtier to reveal his own convictions. At this same time when the road was made to take its new course, the meadows on^^the other side of the 264 THE GREVILLES Avon were enclosed and throAvii into the park. To complete and fully round off this story of obliterating ancient landmarks, the old bridge was wrecked in the same year by a flood. Three only of its arches remain. The Grevilles, the present Earls of Warwick, have a motto to their coat of arms which is a complete change from the usual swashbuckling braggart sentiments. He was surely a singularly modest man who first adopted it. I wish I could identify him. He must have read well the history of Warwick Castle and have pondered on the successive families of cuckoos who have nested in the old home of the original owners. He selected a quotation from the Metamorphoses of that amorous dove, P. Ovidius Naso — O ! quite a proper one, I assure you — Vix ea nostra voco, " I can scarce call these things our own." Whether he meant the heirlooms, the mace that belonged to the great Richard Neville " the King- maker," the Plantagenet and the Dudley relics, or if he were a contemplative philosopher ruminating on the Law of Entail, by which he was not o^\^ler, to do with as he would, but only tenant-for-life, who shall say ? 265 CHAPTER XXVI Guy's Cliif — The legend of Guy — Kenilwortli and its watersplash — Kenilworth Castle. Leamington will scarcely interest the holiday-maker in Shakespeare land. From Warwick to Kenilworth is the more natural transition, and it is one of much interest. A mile and a half out of the town is that famous place of popular legend, Guy's Cliff, where the great mansion, standing beside the river and built in 1822, looks so ancient, and where, on the opposite shore of Avon, stands that mill whose highly pictur- esque features are a standing dish in railway carriage picture-galleries. The impossible armour of the mythi- cal Guy of Warwick we have already seen in Warwick Castle, and the improbable legend of his hermit life in the riverside cave remains now to be told. Guy, returning from the Holy Land and successfully engaging as the champion of England against Colbrond, the giant Dane, in combat at Winchester, retraced his steps towards Warwick. There, unknown by any, he three days appeared among the poor at the Castle gate, as one of the thirteen people to whom his wife daily gave alms ; and " having rendred thanks to her, he repaired to an Heremite that resided among the shady woods hard by." The legend forgets to tell us why he did this, and does not explain how it was that this giant fellow, who apparently was eight feet high, was not recognised by his wife and others. Were they all eight feet tall, or thereabouts, at Warwick in those times ? 266 THE MYTHICAL GUY But it would be wasting time to apply the test of intelligent criticism to this mass of accumulated legends, to which many generations have added something. Guy is a mythical hero, built upon the exploits of some early British champion, whose name and real history are as past recall as the facts about King Arthur. But the great fourteenth-century Richard Beauchamp, Earl of Warwick, who founded the chapel here, seems to have believed in him and in the size of him, for Guy's mutilated effigy placed here by that great earl, whose faith must have been as robust as his body, is the full eight feet long. At any rate, here is the cave of the hermit he consulted with, and with whom he resided, unknown still to his friends, until that holy and rheumatic man died. Here he himself died, two years later, a.d. 929, aged seventy. Thus the story seeks to bolster up the wild character of its details by the specious exactness of its dates. " He sent to his Lady their Wedding Ring by a trusty servant, wishing her to take care of his burial ; adding also that when she came, she should find him lying dead in the Chapel, before the altar, and moreover, that within XV dayes after, she herself should depart this life." Guy's Cave, excavated in the rock, appears really to have been a hermit's abode in Saxon times. His name seems, from the early twelfth-century Saxon inscription found here over a hundred years ago, to have been " Guhthi." It runs " Yd Crist-tu icniecti this i- wihtth, Guhthi " ; which has been rendered, " Cast out, thou Christ, from Thy servant this burden, Guhthi." So romance is not altogether unjustified, and although this misguided anchorite did not appreciate scenery, we at any rate can thus find some historical excuse as well as a scenic one for visiting the spot, with the crowd. It is a pleasant road, on through Leek Wootton, 267 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND where the church, after being rebuilt in an odious style in 1792, has been brought more into keeping with later ecclesiastical sentiment. And so the road runs on, to Kenilworth, through the approach called Castle End. Presently, after threading the long street, there in its meadows rises the ruined Castle. There is no ideal way into Kenilworth nowadays, because the place has become more or less of a town, and numerous Coventry business men make it their suburban home. Thus does Romance disappear, in the daily goings forth and the returnings on their lawful occasions of the residents, and in the spreading of fresh streets and always more cheaply built houses for newer colonies of them. The first jerry-builder at Kenilworth was Robert Dudley, Earl of Leicester, whose badly bonded additions to the Castle still ruinously show how slightly and hastily he set about the work. But of that anon. Castle End is one of those scattered portions of the town that surprise the stranger. He thinks, time and again, that he has seen all Kenilworth, but there is always some more of it. You bear to the left and descend to a broad watersplash that crosses the road beneath densely overarching trees. The people of Kenilworth cling tightly to the preservation of their watersplash, and for several reasons : it is highly picturesque and keeps them in touch with the last elfin echoes of that Romance I have spoken of; the building of a bridge would cost them considerably; and finally they would lose the amuse- ment and speculative interest which has latterly been added to it in these automobile times, when a motor-car may or may not succeed in getting through. For the watersplash is rather a sudden apparition to the motorist strange to the place, and it is a very variable thing. Sometimes it will be a shallow trickle across the road, and at others, when rain has fallen, it will be broad and 268 KENILWORTH CASTLE deep. This is when the people of Kenilworth love to gather on the narrow footbridge at the side and smoke a quiet cigarette, waiting for the coming of the motorist who will presently be in difficulties. It is something of a problem how to pass at such times. If you rush it, as most are tempted to do, you get through at the cost of being swamped with the tremendous spray thrown up ; and if you go gently you are probably brought to an inglorious standstill in mid-stream, with the ignominious necessity of wading out and procuring assistance. In any event, an engrossing spectacle is provided. Once through this ford, you come up to the Castle entrance, on the left. It is a pleasant old part that looks on to the scene of so much feudal state and bygone warlike doings. A group of old red brick and timber cottages, their red brick of the loveliest geranium redness, looks upon a kind of village green. They lean at all kinds of angles, their roofs have skylines like the waves of a troubled sea, in front of each one is a little forecourt garden, and they all supply teas and sell picture- postcards. I do not know what the inhabitants of them do in the winter. Perhaps they come up to London and spend their gains in mad revelry. It is a hungry and a thirsty business, " doing " Kenilworth Castle conscientiously, and the people of Castle Green and elsewhere in this village-town find their account therein. Even those visitors who do not conscientiously "do " it — and they are by far the larger number, both because most have not the intellectual equipment necessary, and because in the rest the weakness of the flesh prevails over the willingness of the spirit — find copious refreshment necessary. There is in fact, a great deal to be seen, and the interest is sus- tained throughout. Viewed in a conmiercial way, it is a very good sixpennyworth. Personally, I consider 269 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Ludlow Castle to be somewhat the superior of Kenil- worth, and to hold the premier position for a ruined castle ; but Kenilworth is first in the estimation of many. It does not make the effective picture that Ludlow forms, crowning its rocky bluff above the river Teme ; for Kenilworth stands in perhaps the weakest situation that ever was selected for an ancient fortress, its ruined walls rising from low-lying meadows, and at a distance having the appearance rather of some huge dismantled mansion than a castle. It is quite easy to deduce the existence of some Saxon lord, Chenil or Kenelm, whose weorth this was, but he is not an historical personage. The first important historic fact that remains to us is the gift of the manor by Henry the First to Geoffrey de Clinton in 1122, but what he found here in the nature of a castle, or what he may have built is alike unknown. From the grandson of this Geoffrey, King John appears to have taken a lease and to have added many outworks to the then existing castle keep, which still remains. That evil figure in English history, travelling almost incessantly about his kingdom, watchful and tyrannical, seems to have been much at Kenilworth, enlarging the bounds of the Castle beyond the original Saxon mound on which the keep and the inner ward are placed, inventing strong dungeons for his victims, and constructing those outer walls which still look out, beyond the original moat. Thus the Castle grew to four times the area it had at first occupied, and as it could not be strengthened by steep approaches, it was safeguarded by artificially constructed water defences. The fortification of Kenilworth Castle was indeed a wonderful triumph of mediaeval military engineering over the disabilities of an unsatisfactory site, and it enabled the disaffected nobles and others in the next reign to sustain a six months' siege ending only in 270 SIEGE OF KENILWORTH their surrender through a plague which had broken out among the garrison. We can still see the nature of these defences, for although the water has been drained away, the circuit of the outer walls, from the Swan Tower on Clinton Green, round to Mortimer's Tower, the Water Tower, and Lunn's Tower remains perfect, and marks where the defences on two sides of the Castle enclosure skirted a great lake formed by damming back two small confluent brooks in the hollow meadows in which the Castle stands. The outer walls, now looking upon pastures where cattle graze, then descended sheer into the water ; a flight of steps leading down from a postern gate still remaining to show where a boat could then have been launched. This lake was half a mile long, from 90 to 100 yards broad, and from 10 to 12 feet deep. The siege of 1266 tried the strength of this strong place. The great Simon de Montfort, who fell at the Battle of Evesham in 1265, had been granted the Castle in 1254. He died in the popular cause, fighting against Henry the Third, and his defeated army hurried to Kenil worth. They found no immediate opposition, and garrisoned the place at leisure, being joined there by many powerful adherents and heaping up enormous stores for a lengthy resistance. Both sides knew it would be a stubborn and difficult affair. The King tried at first to come to terms with the garrison, but he does not appear to have gone about it in the most tactful way. It is true that he was prepared to allow the rebels to compound for pardon with a fine, supposing they did so within forty days, but to " pardon " those who think they are in the right and who are still in arms to assert their rights and redress their grievances, seems an unlikely way to end a dispute. The Church was opposed to the popular side, as may always con- 271 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND fidently be expected, and helped the King's cause by damning the insurgents and preparing the tremendous document known to history as the " Dictum de Kenil- worth," otherwise " the Ban." This was read and pubhshed in the church of St. Mary, Warwick. It proclaimed the supreme will of the King, and, inter alia, forbade the people to regard the dead hero and popular idol, de Montfort, as the saint and martyr they were already declaring him to be. The garrison received this with contempt, and the long siege began. Robert of Gloucester, who records it in eloquent but rugged lines, is too quaint and amusing not to be quoted — " The king anon at midsummer, with strength and with gin To Kenilworth y-went, tlie castle to win ; He swore he would not thence until he were within. So long they sped badly that they might as well bliue ^ None of their gates those within ever close would. Open they stood, night and day, come in whoso would. Out they smite well oft, wlien men too nigh came. And slew fast on either half and prisoners name ; ^ And then bought they them back with ransom. Such life long did last : With mangonels and engines each upon the other cast. The Legate and the Arclibishop with them also nome ; * Two other bishops, and to Kenilworth come. To make accord between the King and the disinherited also, And them of the Castle, if it might he y-do * But the disinherited would not do all after the King ^ Nor they of the Castle any the more, nor stand to their liking,® The Legate with his red cope amansed ' tho ^ Them that in the castle were, and full many mo * All that helped them, or were of their rede,!" Or to them consented, in will or in deed. 1 Draw closer. 2 Took prisoners. ^ They took. * If it might be done. ^ They would not agree to the King's terms. ^ They would not abide by their wishes. ' 8 Then excommunicated them. 9 More. ^0 Counsel. 272 ROBERT DUDLEY Tliey of the Castle held it in great despite. Copes and otlier cloathes tliey let make them of white And Master Philip Porpoise, that was a quaint man. Clerk, and hardy in his deeds, and their chirurgian. They made a mock Legate, in this cope of wliite, Against the others' rede, to do tlie Legate a despite. And lie stood as Legate upon tlie Castle wall. And amansed King and Legate and their men all Such game lasted long among them in such strife. But much good was it not, to soul or to life." There was never another siege of Kenil worth. It passed through many hands, and among others to John o' Gaunt, whose manors are found numerously, all over the country. In his time the great Banqueting Hall, the most beautiful feature of the Castle, was added, and it became not only a fortress, but a stately palace as well. But the most stately and gorgeous times were yet to be. Robert Dudley, Queen Elizabeth's favourite, who aspired to become King-Consort, received a grant of it in 1563, and was created Earl of Leicester the following year. The monopolies and rich offices of State showered upon him by the Queen had already made him an enormously wealthy man, and he deter- mined to entertain his Sovereign here Avith unparalleled splendour. To this end he established an army of workmen here, who treated the place very much in the way adopted by any suddenly enriched millionaire of modern times towards the out-of-date mansion he has purchased. The narrow openings in the massive walls of the Norman keep were enlarged and great mullioned windows inserted ; the vast Gatehouse still standing and now used as a private residence was built ; and the lofty block of buildings added that still bears his name. Many other works, but of less spectacular nature, were undertaken at this time. Dudley had known many changes of fortune, and had been a prisoner in the Tower only ten years earlier, T 273 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND with his father and four brothers, on a charge of high treason; narrowly escaping execution. Now an aston- ishing freak of chance had made him perhaps the most powerful, as well as the wealthiest, man in the country. Sir Walter Scott's novel, Kenilworth, details Leicester's magnificence and the unparalleled grandeur of the enter- tainments given here to Queen Elizabeth in 1575, and introduces his wife Amy Robsart, Lady Robert Dudley, as Countess of Leicester into the scenes of his story. But in 1560, four years before he had received his earl- dom, his wife had perished mysteriously at Cumnor Place in Berkshire, murdered, it has been supposed, at his instigation, to clear the way for that projected marriage with Queen Elizabeth which never took place. Leicester, when he entertained the Queen here so royally, had no " encumbrances," to limit his ambitions. How the Queen was received here and entertained for seventeen days is fully, and on the whole tediously, narrated by a remembrancer then present, but a short extract will tell us something of the quality of these revels. On her Majesty's approach she was met by a girl in character as " one of the ten sibills, cumly clad in a pall of white sylk," who recited a " proper poezie in English rime and meeter, the which her Majestic benignly accepted and passed foorth unto the next gate of the Brayz, which for the length, largenes, and use, they call now the Tylt-Yard ; whear a porter, tall of person, and wi*apt also in sylke, with a club and keiz of quantitee according, had a rough speech full of passions, in meeter aptly made to the purpose." Pre- sently when the Queen came to the inner gate " a person representing the Lady of the Lake, famous in King Arthurz Book, with two Nymphes waiting uppon her, arrayed all in sylks, attended her highness comming," the Lady of the Lake then coming ashore from the 274 FESTIVITIES AT KENILWORTH moat, and reciting a " well-penned meeter." After this, coming to the Castle gate, a Latin poem was read to her by a poet clad in a " long ceruleous Garment, with a Bay Garland on his head, and a skrol in his hand. So, passing into the inner court, her Majesty, (tliat never rides but alone) thear set doun from her palfrey, was conveied up to her chamber, when after did folio a great peal of Gunz and lightning by Fyr work." £1000 a day was spent in the feasting and revelling. Everything was done without stint. The great clock on the keep was stopped. " The Clok Bell sang not a Note all the while her Highness waz thear : the Clok also stood still withall, the handz of both the tablz stood firm and fast, allweys pointing at two a Clok." The hospitable and symbolical meaning of this was that two o'clock was the banqueting hour. Every time when the Queen went hunting in the park, classic deities, and heroes and heroines of mythology would appear from woodland glades and recite com- plimentary poems — greatly to the disadvantage of the sport, it may be supposed. Bear-baiting further enlivened the time, and " nyne persons were cured of the peynful and daungerous deseaz called the King's Evill." Kenil worth passed on the death of Leicester in 1588, to his brother, Ambrose Dudley, Earl of Warwick, and on his decease, two years later, to Robert's illegitimate son. Sir Robert Dudley, who was long an exile, and died in 1649. It was let to Prince Henry, son of James the First, and on his death to his brother. Prince Charles, who purchased it from Sir Robert's deserted wife, whom he, when Charles the First, created Duchess Dudley, 1645. After the King's execution the property was granted by Cromwell to some of his supporters, to whom is due its ruinous condition, for they made the best market they could of its building-stone. On the T2 275 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND Restoration in 1660, Charles the Second granted it to the Earl of Clarendon, in whose descendants' hands it still remains. The visitor to the Castle almost always makes at once for the keep and the imposing ruins of John o' Gaunt's great Banqueting Hall, rising boldly from the mound, partly natural and partly artificial, in the centre of the Castle precincts. He thus follows the natural instincts of sightseers, but the better way, for the full understand- ing of the scale and ancient strength of the works, is unquestionably to first make the inner circuit of the walls. Standing on Clinton Green before entering the Castle, and facing it from the only side not in ancient times defended by lakes or marshy ground, we are on the bank whence Henry the Third's soldiers chiefly conducted the siege of 1266. It was the weakest part of the works, because the high natural plateau entirely precluded the possibility of continuing the water defences on this side. All that could be done here by the military engineers of Kenilworth was to excavate the deep chasm which still remains ; and across this the besiegers vainly tried to pass, with the aid of bundles of faggots thrown into the hollow, while " Master Philip Porpoise," who, as the chronicler truly says, " was a quaint man," stood on the walls, dressed up like the Pope's Legate, and cursed the King and the real Legate and all the King's men. Leicester's great Gatehouse no longer forms the entrance to the Castle, and is in private occupation. It did not even figure in the great reception of Queen Elizabeth in 1575, for she came the other way, through the Tilt Yard and by Mortimer's Tower, and across the great Outer Ward : a method of approach especially calcu- lated to enhance the stateliness of the pageant. All Warwickshire, I think, must have witnessed those 276 THE RUINS doings, from the further bank of the widespreading lake, among them Mr. John Shakespeare and his eleven-year- old son, William, whose imagination would have been excited by the fantastic creatures that sported on the water, and by the fireworks and the heathen gods and goddesses : very real to him, because he was not old enough to know how it was all done. You render your entrance-fee at a narrow gate and are at once free to wander at will. In front is the grassy Outer Ward, and on the right, the keep and the state buildings, with Leicester's Building, lofty, seamed with fissures and shored up against its falling. The eyeless windows preach a homily on the transient nature of things. But, leaving these for a while, we skirt along to the left, coming to the ruins of Mortimer's Tower, whicli stood on the wall and formed the entrance to the Castle in this direction. It looked out upon the Tilt Yard and the massive dam that penned up the waters of the Great Lake. Just before this tower is reached the Water Tower on the wall will be seen, and may be examined. Near at hand are the Stables and Lunn's Tower, divided off by a light iron fence and not accessible ; being in- cluded within the grounds belonging to the occupier of the Gatehouse. But the Stables are seen, clearly enough, and form the most charming colour-scheme within the Castle. They are of fifteenth-century red brick, timber-framed, and of an almost unimaginably delicate and yet vivid red. Next after Mortimer's Tower comes a small postern gateway, with its steps formerly leading to the water. Continuing from it and following the wall, we come under the tottering walls of Leicester's building, on the right, with the massive walls of the state Buildings beyond it. They stand high, upon a mound that formed the limits 277 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND of the Castle of Saxon and early Norman days, and the grassy walk between them and the outer wall was in those distant times the moat, long before the magni- ficent scheme of the lake was thought out. Remains of fireplaces and Avindows in this outer wall show where the wooden buildings that formed barracks for the KKNILWORTH CASTLE : RUINS OF THE BANQUETING HALL. garrison stood. The walk ends up against an archway leading into the garden, or Plaisance, assigned to Henry the Eighth, through which the outer wall continues past a water-gate called the " King's Gate," and so to the Swan Tower, where the circuit is completed, at Clinton Green. But the Plaisance is not open to the public. The way into the central block of State buildings is through a postern doorway on the right, under the Banqueting 278 THE GREAT HALL Hall. The savage treatment of these noble buildings by Cromwell's friends has at first sight obscured the nature of this scene ; but it is soon perceived that the Hall stood high, upon a basement or undercroft, whose vaulted roof has entirely disappeared, together with that of the Hall itself. This postern doorway therefore led through the basement. The Hall was the work of John o' Gaunt, about 1350, and was a grand building in the Perpendicular style, ninety feet long and forty-five feet wide. Lofty and deeply-recessed windows, with rich tracery lighted it, and at one end was an exceptionally beautiful oriel window. A portion of this survives, together with two of the others. The entrance from the Inner Court was by a fine flight of stone stairs and through a wide archway still remaining in greatly weather- worn condition, but showing traces of delicately carved work. Inside is the groined porch, with a recess for a porter. Sir Walter Scott, who here adopts the close account given by Laneham, one of the Queen's retinue during her reception at Kenilworth, and merely edits him» describes the appearance of the Hall, " hung with the richest tapestry, misty with perfumes, and sounding to strains of soft and delicious music. From the highly carved oaken roof hung a superb chandelier of gilt bronze, formed like a spread eagle, whose outstretched wings supported three male and three female figures, grasping a pair of branches in each hand. The Hall was thus illuminated by twenty-four torches of wax. At the upper end of this splendid apartment was a State canopy, overshadowing a royal throne, and beside it was a door which opened to a long suite of apart- ments, decorated with the utmost magnificence for the Queen and her ladies, when it should be her pleasure to be private." 279 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND This magnificence curiously contrasts with the primitive nature of the sanitary arrangements seen in the adjoining towers and in the keep. The Strong Tower and the Kitchen Tower fill up the space between the Banqueting Hall and the keep ; the first named, appropriately enough, from having been a prison. The walls of its not unpleasant, though small rooms, still bear some rudely-scratched coats of arms of those who were detained here. Their imprisonment cannot have been so hopeless as that of King John's victims, in the dungeons of the keep. The keep is called " Caesar's Tower," but the Romans had never any association with Kenilworth. It would better be styled " Clinton's." Like all the buildings, it is of a dull, brownish red stone. . An angle-turret shows where the clock was placed : that clock whose hands always stood hospitably at the banqueting hour in those seventeen days of Elizabethan revel. Leaving Kenilworth for Coventry, the church is on the right. Its west doorway is a fine but much-decayed work of the Norman period, from the ruins of the Augustinian Priory close by. It is a much-restored church, and does not come up to the expectations raised by a sight of its octagonal tower and spire. The only object of interest within is a pig of lead built into the tower wall, bearing the mark of one of Henry the Eighth's travelling Commissioners inquiring into the suppression of the religious houses. It would seem to be one of a number cast from the lead off the Priory roofs. Kenilworth at last left behind, a gradual rise brings the traveller to the turning to Stoneleigh village. It is " Gibbet Hill," The ill-omened name comes from an example of the law's ancient practice of hanging up murderers to the public view, very much in the manner of those gamekeepers who nail up the bodies of the 280 THE GIBBET jays, the rats, the weasels and other " vermin." The criminals whose carcases swung and rattled here in their chains were three in number ; Moses Baker, a weaver of Coventry, and Edward Drury and Robert Leslie, two dragoons of Lord Pembroke's regiment, quartered in that city. They had on March 18th, 1765, murdered a farmer, one Thomas Edwards, at a place called Whoberley, just outside Coventry. Their bodies hung until their clothes rotted ; and then, one by one, their bones fell from their chains and enclosing cages. But the gibbet and the terror of it remained until 1820, when the weathered timber, scored with thousands of the rusty nails which had been driven into it, so that no one should climb the post, was removed to do service in the cow byre of a neighbouring farm. This melancholy history apart, the road is a pleasant one ; broad, and lined with wide grassy edges and magnificent elms. It was even more pleasant before the motor manufacturing firms of Coventry began the practice of testing their new cars along it, and was then the pride of the district. It leads across Stivichall Common into the city of Coventry, over that railway bridge referred to by Tennyson in his poem, Godiva — " I waited for the train at Coventry ; I hung with grooms and porters on the hridge. To watch the three tall spires." I remember a first reading of that poem, and the difficulty of really believing Tennyson meant a railway train. It seemed incredible that he could in such a nineteenth-century fashion introduce an eleventh- century subject. The " train " one imagined at first to be a train in the middle-ages sense, a procession or pageant, and the person who waited for it to be, not Tennyson himself, but some imaginary person indulging 281 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND in historical speculation. But no, he was modern, like his own King Arthur. Here the " three tall spires " first come into view, and the city of Coventry is entered, past the Green and up Hertford Street. 282 CHAPTER XXVII Coventry. Coventry originated, according to tradition, in a con- vent established here as early as the sixth century. Canute is said to have been the founder of another. Whatever may be the truth of the matter, it is certain that the great Saxon Earl Leofric and his wife Godifu in 1043 founded that Benedictine Monastery whose Priory church afterwards became the Cathedral, whose scanty ruins alone remain. These real and legendary religious houses, together with the Monastery of the Carmelites, or White Friars, and numerous others originated a curious notion that the name " Coventry " was really a corruption of " Conventry," the place of convents. It was an excusable mistake, when we consider that the somewhat similar name of " Covent Garden " in London does in point of fact derive from the old garden of the Abbots of Westminster, but it was a complete mistake, all the same. The place-name comes from a little stream called by the British the Couen, not easily to be found in the city itself, but rising to the north and passing through the village of Coundon. (There is a stream of similar name, the "Cound," at Church Stretton, in Shropshire.) It was thus the "place on the Couen." The Saxons, who called that stream by a name of their own, the " Scir-burn,"that is to say, the " clear stream " — which in course of time became the " Sherborne " — did not 283 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND succeed in changing the name of the place, as they did at Sherborne in Dorset; and " Coventry " it remained. The most famous incident in the ancient " history '' of Coventry is entirely legendary; but although proved to be inherently improbable, if not impossible, the story of Godiva and her ride through the streets clad only in her own modesty, is one that will never be destroyed by criticism. It is too ancient a myth for that. About the year 1130 the monkish writer, Roger of Wendover, started it. Whence he derived the story no one knows, but he probably heard it as a folk-legend unconnected with place or person, and took it upon himself to fix the tale on Leofric and his Countess Godifu. He had courage in doing so, for it was only about a hundred years after the time of Leofric and his wife that he wrote. " The Countess Godiva," he says, " who was a great lover of God's mother, longing to free the town of Coventry from the oppression of a heavy toll, often with urgent prayers besought her husband, that from regard to Jesus Christ and His mother, he would free the town from that service, and from all other heavy burdens ; and when the Earl sharply rebuked her for foolishly asking what was so nuich to his damage, and always forbade her for evermore to speak to him on the subject ; and while she, on the other hand, with a woman's pertinacity, never ceased to exasperate her husband on that matter, he at last made her this answer : ' Mount your horse, and ride naked before all the people, through the market of the town from one end to the other, and on your return you shall have your request,' on which Godiva replied, ' But will you give me permission, if I am willing to do it ? ' 'I will,' said he. Whereupon, the Countess, beloved of God, loosed her hair, and let down her tresses, which covered the whole of her body, 284 PEEPING TOM like a veil, and then mounting her horse and attended by two knights, she rode through the market-place without being seen, except her fair legs ; and having completed the journey, she returned with gladness to her astonished husband and obtained of him what she had asked, for Earl Leofric freed the to\\Ti of Coventry and its inhabitants from the aforesaid service, and confirmed what he had done by a charter." The incident of Peeping Tom was never thought of by Roger of Wendover, and does not become a part of the story until the seventeenth century. Who was the genius who invented him is not known; but from that time onwards the peeping tailor who alone of all the people of Coventry spied upon Godiva as she rode through the empty streets becomes an essential part of the legend. His fate takes so mediaeval a turn that he seems really older than he is. Tennyson adopts him, in his poem, as a " low cliurl, compact of thankless earth, The fatal byword of all years to come. Boring a little auger-hole in fear, Peep'd — but his eyes, before they liad their will. Were shrivell'd into darkness in his head. And dropt before him. So the powers who wait On noble deeds, cancell'd a sense misus'd." A half-length effigy purporting to be Peeping Tom occupies a niche in the wall of the " King's Head " in Smithford Street. He is really a portion of a figure of St. George from one of the old Coventry civic pageants ; but he looks so peculiarly unsaintly and has so lecherous a grin that no one can for a moment dispute his entire suitability for the present part. Coventry became so important a place in the early part of the fourteenth century that it was granted a charter of incorporation, and afterwards fortified with walls and gates. Parliaments were held there, in the 285 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND stately buildings of the Priory; Coventry Cross became one of the most famous City Crosses in the kingdom; and the trade guilds were among the richest and most powerful. The mayors, too, were important and fear- less magistrates, as we may judge from the example of John Horneby, who in 1411 caused the riotous Prince Hal, afterwards Henry the Fifth, to be arrested for creating a disturbance, and thus ranks with Judge Gascoyne, who on another occasion committed the Prince to prison. Shakespeare rightly made Falstaff more ashamed to march through this rich and populous town with his ragged company of a hundred and fifty soldiers, and only a shirt and a half among the lot, than Godiva had been to ride through the primitive place of three hundred years before, with nothing — "If I be not ashamed of my soldiers, I am a soused gurnet . . . you would think that I had a hundred and fifty tattered prodigals, lately come from swine- keeping, from eating draff and husks. A mad fellow met me on the way and told me I had unloaded all the gibbets and pressed the dead bodies. No eye hath seen such scarecrows. I'll not march through Coventry with them that's flat ; nay, and the villains march wide betwixt the legs, as if they had gyves on; for indeed I had the most of them out of prison. There's but a shirt and a half in all my company; and the half shirt is two napkins tied together, and thrown over the shoulders, like a herald's coat without sleeves ; and the shirt, to say the truth, stolen from my host at Saint Albans, or the red-nosed innkeeper of Daintry." Coventry, in right of this importance, became a city in 1451, and went on from good to better, until the sup- pression of the religious houses. At that time its population numbered 15,000, but within a few years 286 A COURTLY MAYOR it had declined to 3000. Yet in another thirty years the city is found receiving Queen Elizabeth not only with enthusiasm and splendid pageants, but with the present of a purse of £100; although the depression was still acute. "It is a good gift, an hundred pounds in gold; I have but few such gifts," said her Majesty, who was great but greedy. " If it please your Grace, "answered that courtly Mayor, " there is a great deal more in it." " What is that ? " she asked. " The hearts," he rejoined, " of all your loving sub- jects." " We thank you, Mr. Mayor," said the Queen, " it is a great deal more, indeed." But she did not confer the honour of knightliood upon him. James the First, visiting Coventry in 1617, was given £100 and a silver cup ; probably in the hope of getting a renewal of the charter; but in the next reign we find a very different spirit. " Ye damnable puritans of Coventry," says a letter -writer of the time, " have thrown up earthworkes and rampires against his Maiestie's forces, and have put themselves in a posture of defence." It was at this time that the expression arose of " sending to Coventry " any objectionable person. Those thus consigned to Coventry were prisoners of war. Royalists captured by the people of Birmingham, for whom no prison could be found except in this walled and fortified city. Those walls were promptly destroyed at the Restora- tion, by order of Charles the Second, the citizens of Coventry offering no objection. They had grown weary of the Commonwealth, and when the King came to his own again the city was given over to festivity. The 287 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND fountains spouted claret (not good claret, nor very much of it, we may suppose) ; bonfires blazed ; and a deputation waited upon the King in London and gave him £50 and a basin and ewer of gold. Coventry Cross, already mentioned, was built between the years 1541-44, at the time of the city's decay, after the suppression of the monasteries, and was the gift of Sir William Holies, Lord Mayor of London, who be- queathed £200 for the purpose. It was described by Dugdale as " one of the chief things wherein this city most glories, which for workmanship and beauty is inferior to none in England." But soon after Dugdale wi'ote this the Cross wherein Coventry so gloried was destroyed, and the chief outstanding architectural feature is now formed by the spires of St. Michael's, Holy Trinity, and Christ Church : Coventry indeed being known far and wide as the " City of the Three Spires." It is rather unfortunate that the fine grouping of these three spires, seen best from the approach to the city by the Kenilworth road, is spoiled by the most distressingly commonplace houses in the foreground; and that from no other point of view do they group at all. St. Michael's spire, incomparably the finer, rises with the tower to a height of 303 feet ; that of Holy Trinity to 237 feet ; and Christ Church to 201 feet. St. Michael's church has the reputation of being the largest parish church in England, a distinction claimed also by St. Nicholas, Great Yarmouth, and St. Mary Redcliffe, Bristol. The honour appears to belong to St. Michael's, which in other ways is a notable building. It is generally said to have a nave and four aisles, the two additional " aisles " being really chapels of similar length and appearance : the work of the Smiths' and Girdlers' Companies and the Fellowship of Woollen Cardmakers ; two among the great trading guilds of the city. The 288 COVENTRY CHURCHES Cappers, the Dyers, the Mercers, the Drapers and the Smiths had also their part in these outer aisles. The greater part of the church is of the Perpendicular period and is due to the local family of Botoner, who expended their substance lavishly upon it — "William and Adam Iniilt the Tower, Aiiiie and Mary l)uilt the Spire ; William and Adam built the 54ave And Mary built the C^Juire." So ran the old rhyme. The works were in progress between 1373 and 1436. A narrow road separates St. Michael's from Holy Trinity, which, although in itself a fine Perpendicular building, suffers by comparison with its greater neigh- bour. Here also the guilds — the Tanners, Marlers, Butchers and others — exhibited their wealth and piety in the building of chapels ; and here was a noble stained - glass fourteenth-century window containing the figures of Leofric and Godiva, with the inscription — " 3I Jfuricbc for the lofac of tlitr tlot make (llobentic (Lol-frtc." Christ Church retains only its ancient spire, the ruined body being replaced in 1829 by a work in the most lamentable style. Besides its churches, Coventry is famed for its ancient " St. Mary's Hall," originally the hall of St. Mary's Guild, but afterwards serving as that of the Holy Trinity, a religious society which amalgamated and swallowed up St. Mary's and many others. It bccanie the headquarters of the old municipal life of Coventry, and so it still remains ; a noble centre for the city's business and hospitalities. Coventry nowadays is remarkable for its modern manufactures. In the thirteenth century it was soap that supported the city. Later it was prosperous in u 289 SUMMER DAYS IN SHAKESPEARE LAND the making of woollen fabrics, needles and pins, and famed for a dye known as " Coventry Blue." As time went on, silk-weaving and ribbon-making took promi- nence, and doubtless it was from Coventry that the promised " fairing " was to have come that is mentioned in the old ballad of that faithless Johnny who was so long at the fair — '^ He promised to buy me a fairing to please me, A bunch of blue ribbons he promised to buy me, To tie up my bonny brown hair." But by 1869, when the duty on foreign-made silks had been removed, the silk and ribbon trade began to decline, and the enterprising citizens turned to the manufacture of sewing-machines. Then came the velocipede, the bicycle, and the motor-car. In the making of those two last-named articles and in that of ordnance, Coventry has found its fortune. They are not Shakespearean manifestations, and so need not be enlarged upon in this place. In spite of its modern growth, Coventry remains a very picturesque city. In Butcher Row, and in narrow old alleys little touched by modern developments, some- thing of the mediaeval place may yet be traced ; and in those two charming old almshouses, Bablake's Hospital, founded in 1506, and " Ford's Hospital," built in 1529, half-timbered work is seen very nearly at its best. 290 INDEX Abbot's Norton, 200 Salford, 199 Alcester, 2, 231 Alderminster, 188 Aiidoversford, 21G Arden, Family of, 9, 2.32-235 , Forest of, 2, 7, 129 , Mary, 9, 232 , Robert, 9 Ardens Grafton, loO Aston Cantlow, 9, 235 Atherstone-upon-Stour, 187 Avon, river, 2, 3, 45-48, 79. 190, 210, 219, 240, 2(52, 265, 2(iG Baddeslev Clinton, 7 Balsall, Thomas, 77, 98 Banbury, 2, 18 Barton, 147, 199 Beauchamp F'amilv, the, 247-253 255, 267 Bicester, 18, 20 Bidford, 58, 137, 147-153, 195 liillesley, 12, 232 Binton, 47, 147, 195 Brailes, 191 Broadway, 212-215 Broom, 163 Campden ^Vonder, the. 183-185 Charlecote, 17, 47, 114-126 Cliarles the Second, 14;3-146 Chipping Campden, 173-185 Cleeve Common, 218 Priors, 199 Clifford Chambers, 10, 68, 166- 169 Clopton, Family of, 28, 72, 81-83, 230 , House, 83, 230 , Lower, 173 , Sir Hugli, 40, 63, 82 , I'pper, 173 Combe, John, 78, 98 , William, 134 Compton Wynvates, 191-194 Cotswolds, tiie^ 215 Coventry, 280-290 Dancing Marston (or Long Marston), 141-146 Dingles, the, 13;3-135 Dorsington, 147 Dudley, Ambrose, Earl of AVar- wick, 253, 275 , Robert, Earl of Leicester, 16, 241-243, 252, 27-3-275 Ettington, 2, 186, 188-190 Evesham, 137, 200-210 Exhall, 158 Feldon, the, 2, 164, 191 Frog Mill, 216 Gastrell, Rev. Francis, 73 Gaveston, Piers, 256-259 Greet, 216, 217 Grendon I'nderwood, 18-21 Gretton. 216, 217 Grevel, William, 176-178. 180 , or Greville, Family, tiie, 178, 245, 250, 254, 264 ' Guy of A\''arwick, 255, 26G Guv's C;liff, 266 291 INDEX Hall, Dr. Joliii, 48, 72, 93, 97 Harrington, 200 Hartshorn, 216 Hatha^vay, Family of, 12-15 , Anne, 7, 12-1.5, 101-113 Henley-in-Arden, 2, 8, 235, 237 Hicks, Sir Baptist, Viscount ("ampden, 178, 180 Hillborougli, 147, 152-154 John of Stratford, 75-77 Kenil worth, 268-280 Leek "^Vootton, 267 Long Marston, 141-146, 169 Lower Clopton, 173 Lucy Family, the, 47, 114-126 , Sir Thomas (" Justice Shallow"), 17, 114-119, 124 Luddington, 12, 47, 68, 147, 195 Marlcliff, 199 Marston Sicca (or Long Marston), 141-146 Mickleton, 173 Newbold-on-Stour, 188, 190 Oxford, 18 Pebworth, 139-141 Preston Bagot, 237 Preston-upon-Stour, 187 Quiney, Richard, 28-30, 33, 58 , Thomas, 33, 39 Quinton, 169, 173, 234 Ralph of Stratford, 75, 77 Robert of Stratford, 75 Rowington, 237 Salford, Abbot's, 199 , Prior's, 199 Shakespeare, Family of, 6-11 , Edmund, 59 , Gilbert, 10, 58, 59 = — ^ Hamnet, 22, 26 Shakespeare, Henry, 240 , Lsabel, 7 , Joan, 10, 52, 59 , John, 5, 8-11, 15-17, 22, 26, 51, 59, 166 , Judith, 33, 39 , Richard, 7, 10, 59 , Susanna, 48, 52, 93, 97 , Thomas, 1, 237 , William, 5-7 ; birth, 9 ; marriage, 11-15 ; goes to London, 16-21 ; success in Lon- don, as actor, dramatist and theatrical manager, 23-26 ; his return to Stratford-on-Avon, 27-30 ; purchases New Place, 38 ; he retires, 31-33 ; death, 33 ; scene of his school-days, 67-70 ; his residence. New Place, 70-74 ; the Bacon fana- tics and Shakespeare, 85-91, 94 ; Shakespeare's grave and monument, 89-95; Shakespeare, poacher and deer-stealer, 114- 119; Shakespeare the country- man, 127-135 Farm, Grendon Underwood, 20 Hall, Rowington, 7, 236, 237 Shipston-on-Stour, 186, 190 Shirley, F:velvn Philip, 188-190 Shottery, 12,'l5, 101-113 Snittertield, 7, 8, 9, 11, 49, 238- 240 Southampton, Heiny Wriothesley, Earl of, 17, 30 Stinchcombe Hill, 217 Stratford-on-Avon, 1-5, 8-11, 26- 100 , American Memorial Foun- tain, 43 , Bridge Street, 39 , Chapel, 63, 75 , Clopton Bridge, 3, 40, 45, 164 , Grammar School, 5, 15, 67- 70 , Guild, the, 4, 60-67 292 INDEX Stratford-oii-Avon, Harvanl House, 37, 41-43 — — , Holy Trinity Church, 13, 20, 75-100 , Mason Croft, fiO , Memorial Theatre, 44 , Mop Fair, 37 , Nash's House, 39, 72, 73, 74 , New Place, 28, 31-33, 70- 74, 84, 101 , Old Stratford, 3, 48, 72 , Red Horse Hotel, 40, 43 , Rother Street, 3, 43, 101 , Shakespeare Hotel, 34, 43 , Shakespeare's Birth-place, 49-59, 110, 231 Sudeley, 216, 217 Sunrising Hill, 2, 18, 18(5 Temple Grafton, 12, 13, 154-15G Tewkesbury, 21(5, 219-229 Tomes, John, 143-14G Upper Clopton, 173 248- 241- AVarwick, 240, 20.5 , Beaucliamp Cliapel, 253 , Castle, 254-265 , P:arls of, 247, 240-265 . Leicester's Hospital, 2-15 , St. Mary's Church, 245-253 , Westgate, 240 Welcombe, 98, 133-135, 235, 238 ^\'elford, 147, 195-197 AVeston-on-Avon, 147, 197 Whitchurch, 188 AVhittington, 216 ^V'ilmcote, 9, 232-235 Winchcombe, 215 Wincot, 169, 234 Wixford, 160 Woncot, 217 Woodmancote, 217 Wooland, the, 2 Wootton AVawcn, 235 M^riothesley, Henry, I*larl of Southampton, 17, 30 Richard Clay & Sons, Limited, brunswick street, stamford street, s.e. and bungay, suffolk. PR THE LIBRARY UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA 53 J 4^ Santa Barbara h3 THIS BOOK IS DUE ON THE LAST DATE THIS ^^^^^.^^pED BELOW. 50m-l,'63(D4743s8)476 te»s'fe» UC SOUTHERN REGIONAL LIBRARY FACILI 11 iiii mil Hill Hill iiiiiiiii i|ii III i|iiii A A 001 433 699